I've not slept in three days. The nightmares about my past, what happened in Lake Town, my sister, what I've learned about my father, becoming a father myself. I don't want to trouble Evangelline about any of this. She's got enough to deal with, carrying our child and all. Guess that's why I'm sitting here on the darken roofs of Bree, looking down as the quiet fills the streets.
Stillness, what peculiar creature. It hides away, shelters itself in muffled solitude and prefers to linger in dark, abandoned thought. The quiet can be cruel, too. It easily devours in soft or sadistic reminiscences, best left forgotten and never remembered. Yet it stalks your mind, catching you unaware within its unforgiving talons, to force you back to the dank and abysmal recesses of your being. Strangely enough, it is within these moments of muted contemplation in which I find the sweet solace of self. And perhaps it is here where I, too, find courage to face the uncertainty and complex mechanisms of the future.
At least I got a new contract from the Dawn, guarding a merchant caravan to the Shire and back. It's easy pay and not much danger to face on the roads. Takes me about a day or two every week, there and back to Bree.
I've come to study these strange, short men they call Hobbits. What I've seen in the rolling hills they call home - it's a beautiful land - was their content lives. Simple folk with simple worries. I envy them to a degree. Just definitely not their height. Poor buggers.
I better climb off this roof before Lizz kills me.
