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.