A man from my parents’ church was killed in a car accident yesterday.

I am thirteen years old.

I think I stopped believing in god when I learned why drunk drivers usually survive fatal crashes

It’s because their bodies are loose

If you’re going to be rear-ended, get loose

If you’re going to end up in a three car pileup along the unforgiving roadside, get loose

If you’re going to die,

get loose

The year he died the world got quieter when his mother picked between casket and cremation

The year he died the world got a little bit sicker

They rented out the town hall

Put his face on a projector

Ate M&Ms in the parking lot, angry at god

For a man I’d spoken two sentences to

For having to be at a funeral for the young

You reach a certain point of grief

where even your cells need consoling

Elbow to elbow

Melt into the mint green covered concrete

Must’ve been a thousand people mourning

Well over ninety percent believers in the omnipresent

‘God loves him’ - sacrilegious self-serving pat on the shoulder move your hands elsewhere

but he couldn’t save him.

why not?

he was only 27

Drunk driver, oh you motherfucker

Posted bail and with your loose loser body and scrubbed away every trace of yourself

And skipped town

When I graduated highschool, they held the afterparty in the same room

The walls were white now (get loose, get loose)

All the adults ate Safeway cookies at your funeral and sobbed the whole time

They will comfort themselves with copious amounts of religion and fucking and drinking in their cars when they think nobody is looking

We were pissed off at angels and circumstance and the universe and atoms and everything that had ever existed and nobody would admit it

Reception is in the same room

Lean up against a table in formal wear

There are tears and snot everywhere

Poor son, on a stairway to heaven

Stares down from the stars (that’s not what death is, it’s a cut to black, it’s one final dream, it’s the recycling of energy—get loose, get loose)

His mother still weeps for him but she doesn’t cry anymore

She’d like to be angry

But she doesn’t have it in her

Instead, she will sit with the crumpled black and white pamphlet of her son’s face in the hallway

and breathe

First her husband

Now you

(Later, her second son will join you)

You died in 2019 on the 101

In a head-on

Your mother

Dreams of seeing you in paradise

But god keeps on taking her babies away

I was eight. It was the end of the day. My brother was crying, my parents were yelling, I was caught in the frey. I was curled in to a ball, between corner and a wall. Just like today, and yesterday and the day before, my soul longed for something more.

I wanted my parents to stop fighting. All I wanted a belly that was full. I was scared. My only comfort remembering that this isn’t my home. But it was. That was the thing. There was no where else to go. No escape for me. I remembered the dinner I had the night before. Then heard my dad say it couldn’t go on anymore. Everything I’d done, all the moping and crying, all it did was delay the inevitabl.

No matter how hard they tried, no matter how much time my parents spent it was never enough to win in the end. It never drove away the suffocating pain. The traffic, the head lights, they left me insane. They had helped me before, when I told them what was wrong, but it always went back to the way it was before. So this time, I did something new. I got up and asked myself what I needed to do. There was a mess in the kitchen and everything else besides, but I decided to start with a dish at a time. Slowly, slowly the pile grew. I couldn’t clean them faster than make them, can you? I tried to carry it all and never fall. I became a diplomat, carving peace on a wall. But the tower of dishes, one day, did fall. I guess it was bound to fail. I couldn’t fix it all. Now I sit, after the ashes are cleared. Wondering when it all disappeared.

that sad day I realized I was no more sexually attractive

I smiling cocky confident the girl breaking out giggling

seeing myself in the mirror pudgy wrinkled bald dumb

I had never seen myself that way in her lusty brown eyes

I think I may never enjoy sex again have become an ogre

that time must come to all someday

we all think it so very far away

selling sex buying trading glances

looking to be laid hoping wistful

it vanishes and with it hope

so now I face a non-sexual future

when it was the center of my galaxy

there's always porn porn doesn't care

giggle chortle as our slow to rise fever

sadly shaken not stirred

dying with a wee whimper

something died when I knew my days of romance and roses

has withered like my liver spotted hands people shrink from

a time comes when you've been fucked for the very last time

I should have kissed treasured loved you tender held on tight

but brushed you off had know only know it was my last time

I struggled to think of what to write for this challenge: what moment, or moments, "completely rocked my world"? But of course I know. I always knew.

Looking back, I think I was lucky that I felt regret, real regret, for the first time when I was twenty-seven. What I mean by that is: I was older. I wasn't seven, or seventeen. It took almost three decades for me to think to myself: I really, really fucked up.

Take the person you love the most, and shatter their heart. Then shatter yours. Mine involved a strangulation, too; the cord of a pay phone. It involved medicine, and time spent away, and people closing doors in my face. I was hurt, but I had no one to blame but myself: for once, I couldn't point a finger at the world, or fate, or family. I could only look in a mirror and see what there was to see, which was twenty-seven years of not properly taking care of myself looking back at me.

I remember sleeping for three days straight: this was right before Covid, so I didn't yet know endless afternoons of nothing but slumber and the regret that comes with wasted time. But in this moment, before Covid, the wasted time couldn't be blamed on sickness, or a pandemic. I could only feel a cold bed and a cold gaze of those who thought they knew me, people who would patronize me when the only thing they were actually doing was telling me what I, in fact, had done.

I felt shame. I had felt guilt before, many times, but never before felt shame.

I picked up the pay phone and waited for forgiveness, but of course it didn't come. I was twenty-seven and suddenly deeply aware that I had shattered hearts, said things I couldn't take back, done things that required me apologizing.

It went like this: a broken connection that was in fact just the other person hanging up when they realized I wouldn't change. Not for them, not for anyone or anything, not yet.

My current therapist said that at some point, around this time, I felt self-worth for perhaps the first time. But it took a pandemic, it took a million diseased breaths before a vaccine, it took time alone to write and reflect that made me realize, I am very alone, but with my writing, I don't have to always be alone. I can be alone on my own terms.

I can, therefore, come to terms with myself, with who I am.

I remember the pay phone call to this day. I remember feeling, for the first time, that I had done something irreversible, something I couldn't take back. It took a pandemic to distance myself from that person, the person I was then. It took a pandemic to make me realize that through writing, I could somehow redeem myself.

With regret that profound, there's nothing to do but find redemption.

And alone, I did. The pandemic was the perfect time to become a writer. It was the perfect time to apologize, too. I wrote apology letters first, ones where I felt sorry for mostly myself first and foremost, then burned those drafts, and then deleted more of that same shit, and then finally found redemption in just writing what I felt.

Finally, I could be free of regret, because I could make others relate to what I had gone through.

It was a repentance, then. Writing as cleansing myself of sin. But when I think back to that pay phone call, the one at age twenty-seven that "completely rocked my world", I think of a girl who had yet to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, who didn't know a damn thing about the world, a world that was about to become as sick as she was then, before she got better for having felt regret at all.

You and I have never worked out.

We've tried, and we love each other,

but it always ends eventually-

maybe we just weren't meant to be forever.

But the day I met him,

the guy who has become the love of my life,

was the day I truly started to question

every thought that goes through my mind at night.

I always thought we'd keep going back to each other,

that we would never really end,

but I realized that there are different plans in action for my life;

and that you will either be nothing, or you'll just have to be my friend.

The night this all hit me

is always present in the back of my mind;

it's the night I realized

what it feels like to meet the one I was meant to find.

hell

it seems

at every

mid weekend

we've made

some choices

and wonder

about

"Choice"

like

Sans

Andreas

fault

lines

we've straddle,

as if these

were horses

and we were

green face

nightmare

jockeys

on whom

we've placed

bets upon,

and all

life's worth

is riding

on...

That is the

illustration of

Existential

Dread.

06.26.2024

God, The Universe, and You Part 7: Existential Dread

Existentialism is my friend.

I try to keep in touch as best I can.

We talk a lot about why I decide

To just keep running the treadmill

When I'm not actually going anywhere.

One thing that's nice about him

Is that he reminds me of what's important.

The things that matter most.

When the TV of Reality is all heartache and pain,

And the writers never give that resolution I so desperately crave,

And it feels pointless to keep watching the show,

He asks me why I haven't decided

To pull the plug on the TV

And just sit in dead silence.

And so I always find a reason

To justify not doing so.

Like, maybe next season,

The show might take a turn for the better

And then watching it will be worth it.

And he asks me how I know that,

And I tell him I don't.

I just hope.

And I trust.

It's like the same reason I run the treadmill

When I'm not actually moving.

I just trust.

I trust that all my running in circles

Will eventually make my heart stronger,

So that maybe I can run marathons someday,

And maybe I can win.

How I met my friend,

I don't completely recall.

I think my house burnt down one day when I was young.

And then he saw me lying there years later

And thought he'd have a chat.

Keep me company.

He asked me why I still lay there amongst the ash and rubble,

Even though I don't have the strength nor the materials

To build it back up.

He asked why I didn't just bury myself along with it.

And to be honest, I didn't know at the time.

It took me a couple years before I learned the answer.

It took me a couple years to learn to trust.

But existentialism helped me get there.

With all his questions, and all his nudging,

He helped teach me.

Don't ask me where I live today.

It's not a good place.

But there's still a roof over my head,

A cushion on which to sleep,

And food on my plate every day.

And you can guess who helped me find it.

He told me where to look,

And I went searching.

And now here I am,

Still holding on,

And still waiting to rebuild my house.

But at least I'm still waiting.

And at least I know why.

All because my dear friend

Walked up to my broken doorstep

And decided to say hello.

And for that, I will always owe him

The greatest of my thanks.