Last night I was waiting to fall asleep. It was very dark, no moon, and I was lying in the center of our bed with my arms and legs spread out wide.
The windows were open and the air was coming in nice and cold, and I was huddled down beneath the comforter.
I was lost within that bed, that room.
I mean that I couldn’t find myself in time.
People say, I didn’t know where I was.
But last night, the air moving over my face, I didn’t know when I was.
I kept thinking, When am I? When am I?
I couldn’t answer it. I didn’t know when I was. Or who was still alive.
I don’t want to lose my mind. I don’t want to leave this present life.
When my father said, “The purest expression of love is truth,” or “The purest expression of truth is love,” he was drunk on his new religion. In love with his bromides. Full of faith in some cosmic reconciliation. Faith in the idea that goodness and truth and love and kindness and purity, whatever those things were, would somehow heal him. Would heal us all.
“I’ll object with kindness,” he said, “will her into peace. Do nothing unkind. Abandon anger. I will only love. I will construct, I will not destroy.”
And he did those things, you know.
He wasn’t one of those awful people proselytizing and pious and seething. He really was a kind and gentle man. So much like a wide-eyed child who arrives in adolescence and finds a way to reject all its implications. My father looked around at all the violence and horror of adulthood and he shook his head.
“No,” I imagine my father saying, his wife in prison, his children having abandoned him in their respective ways, “No, I will remain as I am.”
Then he turned and walked in the other direction.