I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow.

Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

I had the constitution of a missionary.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.