The afternoon my father died, I was planting dahlia bulbs with a three-year-old.
One blessed Saturday in March tempted the sun’s lips to graze Spring’s cheek,
Emergent signs of life emboldened to claw out from every hairline crack in the concrete.
We bought six bags of black mulch only to get home and need four more.
We’ll go tomorrow.
As soon as it visited, the warmth began to fade, afternoon nearly diminished, the boys stotting
Through a gale of bubbles spewing from a $16 bubble blower impulse-buy.
I’ll bring the boys to see you when I get back,
A promise from two weeks prior, on my way to my grandmother’s funeral.
The tallest swells doubling over at once.
Something about this place always feels like loss
An admission to my sister before we came home,
Unaware of the full body rotation coming behind a nasty left hook.
And then the Knockout— Unresponsive. I’m so sorry.
No preamble, scripted talking points or artificially constructed explanation to the shock ringing, panic rising, the knowing that it can't be undone.
No invitation to bear witness.
Hanging back, wringing my hands, transformed into a child once more afraid of what it doesn’t yet understand, a still visage, probably cold, only scared me more.
The TV was on, always on, constant companion.
And what was seen wasn’t to be feared,
Only whispered to tearfully a certainty of love
And a proclamation of freedom
To escape, to soar, to return again through the rocky soil and chipped glass,
And now I think I know of what the girl spoke: adequate love without attachment, a satisfaction that seeds itself deep, planted long ago by whose hands I'm not sure, maybe by my own desperate fingers grasping downward into the earth itself half a hundred dimensions from now. From here a fondness, a loyalty unbeknownst to my companions, these friends who allow me a glimpse past the curtain, who unlock ancient crypts and let me descend even deeper down steps of stone and shadow into their four chambers. I wake feeling as though I'm carrying each one of them along the road to self-understanding and when the pressure bears down relentlessly, I feel their silent presence. I see my father, no longer jailed in his body but in the back seat, late 20s, thin and clean and clear headed, dressed to the nines in antique regalia like a prince: he makes a nearly imperceptible nod to me and I keep going. I'm E. E. Cummings, carrying them inside me (hearts in my heart are all of our hearts), brimming with all of this amassed devotion I'll never be able to pour out and just keeps coming
Off all evening I lay heavy on my father’s cracked leather Goodwill couch, still able to faintly smell his lingering cigarette smoke, attempting to read. What I’m reading seems to only heighten the gaping expanse of whatever I sense yet can’t describe, can’t name, until suddenly I’m wailing, I’m inexplicably hot, sweat and salt escaping me as fast as production will allow, something burning itself out, blackening the inner lining until all I can do is curl like a comma, unsure of what exactly is happening but letting it happen until the dog’s head nudges into the scene. I grab for scruff as I would a mother or a lover’s neck, desperate to be young, desperate for childhood, for my phone to ring and the sound of my father’s voice saying “Just checking in,” some inner beast crawling its way out past the exhaustion, the weakness masking itself as strength, the nonchalance I feign as I pretend I don’t need a single one of them, that I could do this on my own, that I’ve always had to figure it out solo anyway.
Slowly, forcing lungfuls of breath, I shuffle across stained carpet, past dirty dishware, past Dad’s vacuum that sits, cord coiling across the floor waiting to trip me up, to the mirror where I briefly consider the raccoon smeared face that’s all mine, I hear the Chinese minister telling me I’ve got Dad’s eyes, I feel Dad’s one good arm grab me and pull me in for a crude hug, the only one we can manage, then I shuffle into the bedroom and instinctively pick out one black mass of fabric out of the ever-burgeoning pile of laundry. “I want to be buried in this extra large AC/DC tee” because I can still hear myself making fun of him wearing it, and I know now what I’m feeling is loss, and that sometimes it is inconsolable, and that this too is a part of everything, demanding to be felt, and that I must learn to keep on going
In the past 10 days, the days following my father’s life threatening series of strokes, I’ve been digging through my personal tumblr and all of the photos and files I have on my computer; slowly, because I’m looking for any and everything that might contain a link to him.
It’s amazing how little you appreciate a person’s life until they’re about to lose it.
I wrote this about a year ago, and found it just now while I’m at work and it was enough to make me cry.
It’s about my family, childhood, my parents and their divorce and of course, “The Sound of Music.” But mostly, it’s about us.
“The Sound of Music”
50 years. It’s been 50 years since one film, a musical, was created. Based on real life, of course. Embellished to certain extents because the power of storytelling lies in the art of symbolism.
I take another sip and fight the building panic… I feel an attack coming on. Warding the assaulting demons, my own mind wreaking havoc on itself, I force myself to turn off the streaming digital music and physically lift the arm of my record player over to the vinyl. I need authenticity. I need the rotation, the physical cyclic nature of a record, producing an actual measurable result.
Ironically, the record is already in place. My mother visited my apartment recently, that must have been when I put this on the turntable…
Another attempt to reclaim the innocence. What else is adulthood about? I have officially sold my soul to capitalism. I plug in my work hours for the next month as soon as the schedule is posted. My fingers fly, they caress the keys, they ache to communicate without triteness, they try to recapture the sense of self I used to take by the reins. “I Have Confidence In Me” after all, or at least I pretend. Such a farce. Ye: rain, spring… seasons shift, shed their layers. Strength only lies in ourselves.
The cat bats a paw at the rotating music. The voices blip and skip. I shriek at her until she retreats.
Now it’s a mountain. A pious, blemish-less woman is telling me I need to climb, ford, follow… not follow any one person, but only myself. I think of how many different dreams I’ve had…. but get interrupted when I have to get up and turn over the record, my dreams put on hold til the music can continue. I stumble, I flip, I set down the needle gently, as gently as possible. Yodeling answers my action with sour sound: this side is slightly warped: how fitting.
Plummer is now serenading. He’s describing how it feels to go to the hills… how it feels to sing once more. It’s the voice of hope. It’s scratchy, it’s sour, it’s uneven. Julie Andrews begins the next song: she’s telling me how to begin. She’s telling me how to make it easier. She’s simplifying. I picture the poster on the wall of my high school math teacher’s room: S I M P L I F Y.”
It’s mathematics.
Cutting away, shaving the imperfections from the skin. Slicing away the unnecessary bits. Do re mi. “But it doesn’t mean anything?!” A voice answers: “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything!”
My words are brushstrokes. They’re needles pulling thread. They’re fingertips on keys. They’re plucking strings. They’re revving engines. They’re grasping a pencil, a pen, a brush, a bow, a gun.
My words create what I cannot utter.
My words sing, they drive, they write, they script, they paint, they shoot, they kill. I need so much help climbing this mountain, let alone every one after it. I admit the worst: my nails are cracking, the blood is seeping down cuticles. I try to ignore pain. I try to convince myself of complacency. I try to appreciate the minor milestone, because everything counts, right?
I text my father. I text my sister. I text old lovers. I don’t text those I loved but couldn’t tell. I don’t reveal weakness to those who didn’t give me enough of a chance. I reveal nothing. To them, maybe I still appear aloof, when really I’ve been crawling on bloody, pulp crusted knees.
And what is the sound of music?
The sound echoes, it harmonizes, it takes a quick solo, it charms in during a choral rendition. The sound of music is my father, my mother, my baby sister.
The sound of music is me, the oldest, the one who must raise her chin highest during the standing ovation in order to to convince our enemies that we’re legitimate. “Why yes, can’t you tell? Can’t you tell, Fuhrer?” Can’t you tell that we’re shattered? That we’re splitting at the seems? That our threads are weak? Where did the bond go, I wonder? Was it ever there to begin with?
“I will always love your father.”
Famous final words, right? Or a premonition of disaster, of a lifetime of trying and failing? I try hard to remember if I ever heard my parents utter the promise “I love you” while looking each other in the eye. Is I love you even a promise?
In my attempt to remember, instead I see the four of us watching The Sound of Music. I see the muscles in our calves straining as we climb uphill. I see the wind in our blond and golden and brown hair… I see our hands clasped together, refusing to let go, refusing to let the enemy claim us. Instead I see us hiding and making our escape, I see us rejecting the hate, rejecting the hurt that none of us could help but inflict upon each other.
I see my parents believing in the same cause. I see them fighting the same fight. Believing the same beliefs. I see the snow falling on the lake, I see my sister and I howling at Orion, make believing our way into adulthood, still star gazing in that cul-de-sac. I see us burrowing into the snowbanks, hiding from the bad guys. I see our unit, the two people who brought us into this world… the two who were so different yet managed to bring two beings so alike into being.
I pray that whoever is listening blesses us, because they will always be my home. Even now, when they seem to stand on opposite banks over an unassailable river, an unfathomable expanse,… when I’ve lost it all, they’re who I turn to, even in their brokenness. They alone love me even when I’ve made the worst mistakes.
I feel like all of my limbs are being broken Baseball bat cracking and obliterated Bone, dust, ashes to ashes amen and I am wide, fully awake for every single second
That January night I caught a ride to a bar in a city I’d only heard
about until I was glancing shyly out the backseat window, O Boston, and
didn’t it seem like a good idea? We were all just trying to connect, as
they say, It’s all in who you know. I know I like Indian pale ale
eyes, smart labels, a graphically designed specimen
of either
of any
of no gender. It’s more about the war wounds anyway and then
that night,
he on one side I on the other,
How many tattoos do you have?
like I’ve never been asked, though just then I began to feel it,
the way I start to feel when I’m near big bodies of water, a fluidity,
as if my mother made late 80s love on-board a sea god
and my birth was a Katrina, a Camille, a Sandy,
and when I look across at him, he unflinching in the center of my
tumultuous helix, I allow it:
"I’ve lost count.“
Later, with this specimen of leather and argyle, Stranger,
on the platform just waiting but waiting less
alone than before, I think of the temple veil, wouldn’t
it have been so dark?, and isn’t this just another attempt
at connection? Streets swimming with lights green, yellow, red,
but please don’t stop, I didn’t want to stop. They say
at the hour of Christ’s death, that fabric split,
as the man in South Station
began playing Pachelbel’s Canon, jazz riffing
to a tambourine half-time tick. I didn’t look
directly, I didn’t kneel and drop coin. Meanwhile that sweet
jive tore me a little bit more from the top down,
incapable of mend or stitch or river or thread,
two halves, two sides but of what, if not the same coin?
and at that hour, they say their god would never again
return to a temple made by man’s calloused, wicked hands,
and we lost those hours but maybe they play on, looping
continuously, because there in waiting, smelling piss and
liquor, listening to the man with his open guitar case of silver and singles,
there, split-heeled, raw soled and molting,
six pack lips on citrus skin, a couple of live wires snapping in the darkness
Like Janus, looking with his two faces
both backward and forward simultaneously.
There you are, your monstrous looming darkness
as you pour water from the pitcher
into the burner of the stove, 2 a.m., or 3?--
time doesn't move doesn't matter
when the only crucial thing is to hide
your keys. In my vintage cigar box I hid
your phone, too, while you were busy tapping
out piles of basil, dill, salt like
little ant hills on the kitchen counter.
Cigar box pushed as far beneath the bed
as it'd go. Between hours 4 and 5--I lift
your legs back onto the couch. Like Raggedy Ann,
like a burlap sack filled, brimming
over. Like the deadest weight. Like rotting
flesh
though you know what they say, that
our cells slough off and get reborn
seven years later, and doesn't it sounds nice
to think someday you'll be entirely new?
Hate to break it to you though and wouldn't you know it
they lied. Those science jobs failed to emphasize
it's the neurons that count, bloody,electrical,
endlessly firing between squishy lobes.
Your shit is all just faulty hard wiring
they haven't yet figured out how to fix
Half-Way-Through-Review of Maloney's "Cult of Loretta"
At the recommendation of my writer friend (the one I try to emulate), I’ve been reading a short novella by Kevin Maloney, titled “Cult of Loretta.”
She told me it hurt but I wasn’t sure how accurate that would be; all I knew was after the first page, I felt like my fingertips had been slit raw from the paper edges. Page two and page three only deepened said cuts.
Loretta is short, but I’m not finished yet because 1. I’ve become a slow reader; 2. I waste time eating what I can boil in a pot on my stove and drinking Wild Turkey; and 3. I also waste time watching “Game of Thrones” with my buttered rice and whiskey whilst creating vivid threesomes in my head between Jaime and Cersei Lannister, and yours truly.
While I’m almost done with Loretta, I will admit that I could already be done, only I’m dragging my feet, as they say. Not because I’m a lazy whiskey drinking couch potato but because my friend was right: it hurts. It keeps hurting with each couple of pages yet I don’t want it to stop so I’m reading slow.
This slow reading, this putting off of the inevitable end (which can only be the saddest, most existential ending in the history of such things), is also happening because as they also say: reading is what makes a better writer. Read a shit ton (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea).
Reading Maloney has elevated me and his writing hurts yet makes me want to spew it out too: spew out that hurt! Spew out those thoughts of meaninglessness and death and morbid, indifferent stars silently passing no judgment on our fractionally shit strips of lives on a planet that just happened to support living organisms. We just got dealt some cards. The dealer just wants us colder so we get drunker so we play more hands and tip bigger.
But damn, how about Maloney?
Nelson’s disintegration into oblivion, all in his mind due to Loretta, really prods at my own questioning demons, the little shits! Maloney succeeds at transmitting his coming-of-age battlescars that I bet won’t ever let him forget how fucked up we all get, thanks to love, death, and adulthood in the U.S. of A.
Read it and weep, sweethearts. Or don’t! Our experiences are singular, and inconsequential.
My words are just wisps of cobalt and tar cloud trailing from the end of the next guy’s cigarette, vanishing into the heavy, brush stroked November gray.
In response to your voicemail, the 10 second one you left just now, the one where you simply said, “Fuck you,... fuck you...”
I would say (but won’t because what would the point really be):
Suck my bag of dicks. Listen to how profane I can get, as the daughter of someone who is so ill that he can live with telling his offspring to go fuck themselves. Suck it.
I got up far earlier than I wanted to on my one morning to sleep in and why? For you. To take you to the DMV. To help you do something you’ve needed to do for months. I got up because I’m the one who must hold the money allotted to you. I have to hold this money, I have to be the wallet, bifold, trifold, that remains responsible enough to
get things done.
For you, I rushed through my morning routine. Quick shower. Pulled on some work clothes. Took the dog out only to realize: you’re not here. You’re not home. You’re god fucking knows where in the boonies. You’re being the chauffeur to a bunch of your fellow bums. You’re neglecting your responsibilities for what? For people that wouldn’t return the favor. You’ve banded together in a troop of misfits, of dirty unemployed chainsmoking on-their-way-out bums.
Oh and meanwhile: your sister is the headwaters of the wallet that I must now be. She’s poured thousands and thousands into you, to keep you alive, to keep a roof over your head, to keep you mobile. She’s given you so much and how do you repay her? Oh that’s right. You don’t. You take take take. You take and don’t feel remorse or regret. You feel entitled, perhaps. Or maybe you’re so ill that you just don’t feel much at all, besides the repetition of taking. A comfortable habit.
Well guess what: fuck you too. I’m not going to call you back or text it to you, like I have in the past, because I don’t want to say such garbage to you. You’re my family, the only one I’ve got in this miserable world, so nah, I suppose I’ll keep my responsible pants pulled up and not take a shit on your head for the way you treat me. I’ll just put your survival money in a tin can and wait til you want to come around. Maybe you’ll apologize, maybe you won’t.
I hope, if you ever allow yourself a moment or two of silence to reflect, that you remember your sister, that you remember your daughter, who worked together for your greater good. I hope you remember the time you had to call me. You, broken down, out of gas, in an Oklahoman convenience store parking lot. “I think this adventure is done.” You needed money to make it home. I helped because your admission of defeat made my stomach turn.
Unfortunately you always bounce back.
Old habits are hard for old dogs to break.
Well peace out, Pops. See ya around. Catch ya later. I hope that “fuck you” and all the other “fuck yous” whisper to you occasionally, and that you somehow get a divinely inspired vision of the tears tracking down as I lay on my back, little paths driven by gravity. Yep, you’d think I’d be immune to the sting by now, but I suppose my skin has never been very thick.
I stand over the sink
Spoon in one hand phone in the other
Taste testing the pasta off the bamboo
Reading about quantum mechanics
And decaying functions.
While bringing the spoon down I think
The pasta is still al dente
So I pause to inhale again.
So: time is imaginary!
And perhaps in another dimension you hold the spoon
To my lips instead; perhaps It is happening right now, Only a short parallel universe away,
And that explains why, when I open my eyes, I am somehow confused when you’re not standing beside me.
Shit! I move quick to turn down the burner.
Somewhere near, the water boils over.
It was a work night in the middle of December ‘11. Four months after the hook-in-knee incident. Both A. and I were managers at two different Arby’s. Our shifts started in thirty-five and it took nearly that to drive to the north side from our central apartment. There’s not enough time I laughed as we fucked around, engaging in a quickie before we both headed out the door. I’d been juggling five classes at on top of the 45 hours of roast beef madness that was required input for my salary. Suddenly a sharp pain in my lower abdomen made me wince, but I rolled over and thought nothing much of it. As I frantically slipped on my grease shimmering Treadsafes, I realized I was still feeling odd. I reclined on my side. What’s wrong? A. inquired. I have no idea. A mix of what felt like cramps or gas, but was neither. I rolled into different positions. I curled into a fetal ball. Maybe it’ll go away soon, I assured him. I phoned the manager on duty and explained I’d be a bit late.
Thirty minutes passed. Nothing different. I headed to work, calling each of my parents (just divorced) on the way for advice. Maybe gallstones, my dad speculated. My mom shot even more obscure worries into the void. I’ll be fine I guess, thanks anyway, I gritted.
That night at the Arby’s is foggy because the majority of my time was spent at the desk in the back room. I deteriorated over the course of the evening. A blessed force of the fates allowed my favorite right-hand shift manager to be one of my closers that night. She worked miracles through the dinner rush as I went in and out. I tried eating. I tried throwing up. I tried shitting. I googled my symptoms. Nothing was working, I was probably dying.
Around 11 p.m., closing time, I phone my father to call an ambulance. I’d never been in an ambulance before. I couldn’t afford an ambulance. But I’d be dead soon so the bill wouldn’t be my burden. The time spent between that call and me being carted into the Deathmobile included passing out (first timer), a very inconvenient power outage, barfing in front of all of my employees into a trashcan (still in the dark), and being strapped to a rolling gurney in front of my audience. My little sister, who accompanied my father up to the store, asked to ride with me but I tell her no. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t let her ride along.
I spent the rest of the night at the hospital. After rounds and rounds of tests, they simply told me a cyst--most likely brought on from the stress of 45 hrs/week and five college classes--ruptured and bled out. The body’s way of telling me to slow the fuck down. It’s not a race.
I missed my final exams. I missed a week of work. I recouped and carried on but I began to respect the body’s relation to stress and time. When I reflect on this night, one small moment always ripples to my memory’s still surface.
After rounds of tests, I asked someone if A. was there. In the lobby, we’ll go get him. For hours I had been imagining he had flown the coop, hightailed it out, disappeared like guys typically do. Pain dulled slightly from the sympathy-morphine the docs gave me, I opened my eyes and smiled. You’re still here. He sat down next to me, me with my wires and tubes and gown. My ass sticks out of this gown if I’m not careful. He took my hand. He made a slight whimper sound, gesturing toward the venous drip I was rocking from one arm. Your crotch looks good in those work pants right now, I joked. He laughed and I laughed, though was quickly quieted by pain. He squeezed my hand. I would never leave. I closed my eyes. I didn’t think it at the time, but I now recognize what I was feeling. In that moment, in that hospital bed, I knew what it was like to have people. My own people. My own someone. No walk-outs. No abandonment. Just a person, there, holding my hand while I was raw and filled with wild blood.
I lift mine eyes, still caught by surprise, even after it all, and I feel you’ve slugged me a mighty one, an eye black and swollen in the corners, blood and shaking knuckles like some unknown to you.
This is a folk tune centuries past, still tapping out on some poor boy’s frets. Spare some change, will you?
Gravitational pull, etched in stone with fingernails, a blind man’s prophecy, “It Will Come To Pass”: she’s spitting salt in my wounds, she’s tearing past me, leaving me bruised and isolated where I was before.
A duet is drifting mournful and minor in key.
Inside this shifting retinal prism, I am now inside a midnight revery. I’ll rewind and hit play, rewind and hit play. Pause the tape. There: there, my lips were no longer cracked and torrid when pressed to hers. Our feet crush leaves, stepping on each other, rehearsing for later. She darts away and jumps back, dancing in retreat yet bounding, exhilarated, in her return. Her voice so innocent, controlled, concealing weapons of fierce indifference. Aim, exhale, fire. Trigger-Finger, little lady, spitfire. I bite my tongue. I press close, cheek to cheek, and try to memorize what I will walk away from.
This is my dance. My barefoot pointed toes are wild and reckless.
I crave chaos.
The tempest kicks the ass of inert rotting.
It’s the place where the galaxies circulate, the edge where inhaling and exhaling becomes Creation all on its own and Heaven is the flick at the end of your wrist, becoming what you can feel and sense and exist within – I keep going for that.
I keep going because I’ve been there when the explosions are the most brilliant and devastating.
Perhaps this is providence. I seek to be wide-eyed, a little bit past the “Dead End” sign. Everyone should turn back, logically. If only people understood the real excitement, the real destination, is so much better past the signs.
You just have to risk getting your fucking shoelaces muddy.
I swear, you have to dance in rainbows of gasoline a bit. Embrace the tragedy half the time.
This is my major.
I understand it, I know its form, I know its colours.
I have turned untameable filly, coming close just to get a taste of what’s missing but am too stubborn to risk getting roped down.
I’m a shitty band’s description:
She is a victim of her own responses
Shackled to a heart that wants to settle
And then runs away.
A creature to cringe at, to turn away from, an ugly scar that didn’t quite heal right.
Hey, truth isn’t beautiful.
It isn’t supposed to be.
It’s not pretty or endearing.
It’s morbid and it stings like a bitch.
Tetanus shots and onion tears,
Stinging, stinging and stinging until you’re wiping at your eyes like the allergies got the best of you.
Well, I’m the ragweed on the breeze.
I’m the mold spores and the green murky water in the backyard cess pool.
I don’t like throwing things away.
People are the universe, the ultimate “things” for me. They’re where I lay my foundations.
I breathe as they inhale and I find what peace I have as they exhale.
I survive in the space between the systole and diastole. The beating is just a precursor.
I live in the pause. The tiniest fractions of time between the living and the not living.
The difference between what things are and what things should be.
No, “not broken,” just bent. Bent, learning to keep that chin up.
Would you say yes, in May–
Month of bees–maybe? Blooming petal pleasure
Pitter patter of your bare feet,
Or perhaps you wouldn't say anything, you'd just look longer, oh Chestnut eyed goddess give me
The pleasure, would you,
If you could you, let me tempt that fleeting linger into a dance beneath beams of stage light,
Bar light,
Sweet might, if you could, wood, mahogany shimmer I smell on interior Floorboard: Kiss me, just once more,
For the memory, “for old times”,
Or let me taste that flower center,
Every finger–
A print, a kiss, a joke,
A “just once more” or “maybe twice”
Temptation, oh would you? In a whisper? In a truthful game of dares undying?
Damn you. A lure caught fast in stubborn branch, snared, snarled, though less sinister than the fisher refusing to cut the line.
and one year ago he entered the library where I work.
His name was Justin and he began to display erratic behavior,
Wandering, pacing, perhaps unsure of where he was.
His name was Justin and he was found, minutes later, by a janitor, who informed those in charge that Justin, shirt now off, was rolling on the floor as silent volumes of literature formed a hedge around him.
Officers were called. This behavior was not appropriate for public spaces. He could be dangerous to us, to himself, to women and children.
His name was Justin and, you see, Justin had served two tours in Iraq. Operation U.S.A. Operation Freedom. After 9/11, Justin had been so moved that he decided to join Uncle Sam. The Army welcomed him with open arms. "Give us your boys." Boys, or lambs, to a slaughterhouse shaded in ever shifting light. Try to look closely and the images blur. You become convinced that sending the young in the name of your own liberty makes them brave, makes them heroes, instead of an order of the most sinful manipulation. You cross your heart and sing "God Bless Us" yet ignore that these boys---these bleating boys of each backwoods hollow, who used to bolt barefooted through creeks and chigger filled pastures, who would cup fallen baby birds in shaking palms, who would banter with their mothers, who would get playful swats on their behinds, who would chug clinking glasses of lemonade through dusty cracked summertime lips
---are dying.
Dying, if not in the East, in your own god damned alleyways, in empty apartments, in the time between the coming of 2:00 a.m. and when they are found the following day, the following week.
Justin, Justin Wayne, was of course banned from the library. Chances can't be taken. There is the greater good to consider.
The same way we send the boys to Iraq--for the greater god damned good.
"We feel bad, but we can't save them all."
My coworkers swarm around the obit in today’s paper, clucking about how sad it is.
I go to the bathroom and scrub my hands under boiling water; they feel dirty. Stained. Bloody.
A quick search shows Justin's Facebook page on August 14th, one day before he was found dead in St. Louis. He had posted a Marilyn Monroe quote: "If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
Tonight I will return to my shoddy apartment and tip one up toward the wrinkled United States flag on my wall. A memento and acknowledgement of all of the ironic, backwards, murderous actions it has defended.
Tonight, the toast will go to Justin, who no one could handle, who never had a chance in hell or America to show us his best.
