The Opening of "Lighting the Way Home"
Chapter 1: 2024—The Rolling Fog Nantucket Harbor
If you live life with integrity, you can face the darkness without regret.
You’re fucked. Better fix things while you can.
The sentences ricocheted through Ted’s brain, two different responses to the same situation. His therapist had uttered the first, trying to provide a considered roadmap to turn bad to good. The second was his organic reaction that echoed throughout the quiet evenings when he was alone, trying to make sense of a disappearing future. It was an acknowledgment of a unfortunate truth and the impetus to the most important journey of his life.
He stood on the slippery bow of the ferry slicing its way through the inky blueness of the Atlantic Ocean. Any sense of forward progress was obscured by the salty, wet blanket of fog that hung over the February morning. Beads of moisture coated the cold steel of the bow’s railings, making it hard to grab hold. The wind whipped his hair into a tempest of pepper interspersed with a snowstorm of salt. The crying clangs of navigational buoys scuttled across the water. He cast his eyes, blurry with regret, over the horizon that seemed to laugh at him with its sense of permanence. Ted couldn’t calm the sudden rage that swirled around him, its frenetic energy matching his anxious state.