The Grand Inquisitor

Nighttime in the dark parking lot, blackness of the heavy humid sky swallowing up the push-bumpers on the car and her fighting the sobbing on the other end of the phone. And that there was nothing I could do but quietly rage and swallow back the bile that was rising in my throat. I imagined his androgynous frame and stupid slack-jawed stories that I endured but never listened to and what the squirrel's head looked like in the shoebox, after. The two visions winding themselves around each other and the passing thought that perhaps it signified how I was utterly broken inside, desensitized to some things, corners of the heart filled with hate. And the immediate dismissal and then sinking back down into that image of broken, fragmented skull and viscera and brain and the stupid smile.

All I could think to offer was the only form of strength I knew, and that was sequestering ourselves away in the Ford on a midnight stretch of road and to put of why and to just exist as a function. The prayer I say to St. Michael to guide my mind and eyes and hands and feet and to just let me be worthy of having your mission pass through me for the next eight hours.

And I may have decided that these long, dark, lonely tours are the best way to heal. From anything.

Later, days later, the oppressive sun and lake and the late night heat and that I had no place to go, that there had been no plan made, and how my mind took that and plotted it on a chart somewhere, in the recesses. Middle of the day fluorescent lit bathroom, my escape, and she kept me company while the eyes of the person in the glass welled up, spilled. I bit my cheeks. Feeling trapped in every way possible, I always imagine myself on a piece of slide glass, under a microscope's lens. I walked out into the heat and up and up and up and offered up a long and rambling prayer while I decided that it was not a bad thing that we had been spoiled by each other.

There is so much more inside but the sun is cresting the eastern horizon, painting the sky, and it would be wrong of me to not bear witness.