It Never Ends

Well, it's Wednesday. Every old person in any grocery store feels compelled to remind me: These are the best days of my life . I feel it is true in my bones. It is an aching. I feel it most when getting the boys out of the bath. I hold both ends of a towel that is barely dry from yesterday's ceremony. "Arms straight up!" I wrap each tightly and water beads on the ends of each lash. I'm still wearing my work shoes. It never ends.

I don't know what will happen next. The sweetness of a toddler's naive question and the agony of living life have to play out on in the same stage separated only by the shell of set that is a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom lit from the front in warm tones. My mind is wrapped-up/suffocated-by the thoughts of sexual dysfunction and alcoholism within my greater family. The temptation of the educated mind is comfort in complexity while wishing for ignorance and the simplicity of right and wrong. I wonder sometimes if I am set free. I am tempted to rest in the pull of gravity. I think of a balloon's fate.

Here I've talked to everyone with ears and think I still hold some inherent value in the boundaries of my skull forming a border between the nations of my mind and life. I regret having had to be the person I have no choice in being. Over pizza a friend asked me "are you friends with your siblings?" and at the time I thought the question was hard to answer because it was a good question but realized later that it was because it was a dumb question. No. I'm not friends with them. I am family with them. Family is someone you can hug sobbing at the airport and then nag them about their posture and wonder who is doing better in life.

Move the stage lighting and the shadows change the mood of the show. I plugged in a string of orange Halloween lights on the mantle and the warm glow makes me think of childhood when I hung lights in my bottom bunk. I thought of bursts of dancing when no one was watching not even God himself when I felt like I was fully me and must have looked like I was demon possessed. I thought of burying my face in the blankets when my siblings and parents were screaming at each other. The family dog, a bearded collie, did the same next me. We wrapped ourselves in a blanket of flimsy protection.

I wrap up my boys in their towels. I call them burritos. I protect them from evil. I bet these are the best days of my life. I will make it so. I will eat Mexican food from a gas station. Some think that heaven is a place you go when you die; I don't. I visited my childhood church over the weekend and the pastor explained that you just can't "hope so" but you have to "know that you know that you know." I wondered if he understood faith. Like heaven to him was knowing things for sure? I think it is quite the opposite. Hell can have certainty. Hell can have the pain of knowing the truth. Hell can have the Bible studies where we learn how to tell people that they are sinning with the haughty consolation of grace and a theatrical pointing to the sky and subtle eye wincing to show that you care.

It never ends.

I'm Sorry

Black vultures have been flying in circles over our home on Yale Street North. I see them when I go for a run. I see them when I am mowing the lawn that is still recovering from Hurricane Irma, but God bless Puerto Rico, I won't complain about it here. I see these vultures's white excrement all over my minivan in the street. I lifted a blind to spy on them and found them alighting on a Japanese plum tree to feast. It felt good to know why they were circling, like some guilt had been lifted.

Do you hold guilt in your heart? Do you hear the distant thumping of it under the floor boards? Say you're sorry more often. Cry alone or with someone.

Recently I have begun carpooling to work to minimize my carbon footprint (and save money so I can spend it on frivolous other things like coffee or health insurance). In the time that I normally would be tapping my fingers on the steering wheel to whatever new highly produced song Maroon 5 currently has on the radio, I am listening to my passenger encapsulated in our vehicular confessional box flying over the windswept waters of Tampa Bay with dolphins enjoying consensual and pleasurable sex just beneath.

The conversation we have! We talk about celebrity psychics. I google information debunking them while my coworker drives. She's impressed with Tyler Henry, I'm disgusted. We stop at the airport post office and we run errands. We take the yellow Florida skies for granted and complain about having to do work at work. I think we are confirming to each other that we do have higher aspirations than shooting emails and touching base and hunting down an electronic signature in a "professional office setting" in 2018. People kill themselves for less, I guess. We open up about our families and our struggles and how we found our special person and how we find them difficult from time to time. It seems we find someone so different from ourselves that we couldn't help but love them. This is problematic. So rather than listening to a heavily partisan podcast and grumbling over politics all alone I'm talking about Leah Remini's extensive face work  and her dead expression in the early morning and early afternoon. And Scientology of course; so much Scientology. One coworker divulged that due to what her therapist deemed a high moral complex she developed a compulsive disorder where she gets stuck in thoughts of killing those she loves. The more she loves you, the more you are susceptible to be killed in her mind, because she so doesn't want to. I'm reminded of a thorn in our side and blood and water flowing from Jesus' side. "Look  beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid," because Sufjan can't help but relate to a child serial killer. I must say the hyperbole is much less "neat!" with two young boys of my own.

So like looking to the kindness of your parents when they ask you to "Show me where it hurts," lift your shirt and there next to your belly button where you once connected as one body with your mother is a wound still raw and bloodied or maybe a scar. Either way, be vulnerable enough to seek healing.

Jesus, I'm sorry. Holy Ghost, I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. Ash, I'm sorry. Children, I'm sorry. Parents, I'm sorry. Friends, I'm sorry. Family, I'm sorry. Tim, I'm Sorry. Puerto Rico, I'm sorry. Nehemiah, I'm sorry.