If One More Person Says “God Doesn’t Make Mistakes” I Am Going To Beat The Brakes Off You In An IHOP Parking Lot

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