Confessional, part 1

"What do you want to confess?"

"I don't like this assumption of fault, frankly."

"Well, everyone makes mistakes. No one completely avoids them...."

Silence.

"Father, why would God care?"

"Because he loves each and every one of his children and wants them to do their best in life. He wants them to take the self-enriching path."

Even more silence.

"Ok. It's been....never since my last confession. I guess I never felt it necessary. Not that I thought I was perfect, just more that God might forgive me as I went along. What's more important to me is that the people close to me forgive me, to be honest. But I know that we can't have the season of joy without the season of privation.

The truth is, father, that I'm having a difficult time relishing any happiness at all in this. Everything feels very sad and heavy."

"It's supposed to be unpleasant."

"That's not a good selling point."

He chuckled.

"I'm tired of apologizing to people for backlogs of things that I can't even remember."

"Are you *sure* you're in the right place?"

"Good point."

Theresa fidgeted.

"Does it get easier?"

"No. We toil over these things and then we die."

"How sunny."

"Say 10 Hail Marys and call me in the morning." I think I heard him wink.

She stepped outside and wandered over to the small garden with the statue. She ran her hand into the moist earth, then felt the firm stalk of a tulip. It seemed like forever since she had relished the touch of anything. She felt like a 2-year-old.

"Give me eyes to see."

Hours passed. Evenings were still frigid. She savored the closeness of polluted light and distant trucks.

Everything seemed polluted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gender rant: I'm not here to give you a boner and neither is anyone else.

I'm going to work this kind of like a list of extended bullet points. Hey, kids. So let's talk about a little something called gender expression. Gender expression comes in many different varieties, and has taken on different sub-labels in popular or regional culture. Some of these labels that you might know are concepts like "dyke" "femme" "twink" "tranny" and other terms. Though there doesn't seem to be an overarching consensus on whether or not certain terms are considered offensive, partially due to the culture of term reappropriation in recent years (for instance, affectionately or cattily using the term "fag" within the gay male community), mainstream culture has adopted some terms and concepts as shorthand for certain gendered lifestyles. I argue this- No one should be unfairly reduced to their gender expression by anyone else. I believe that it is unfair to assume that someone considered to adopt a more convent...
Read more

Pop Culture Nation-A Recovered Memory of Cherished Treasures

Sometime between 2004 and Spring of 2006, I forcefully slammed a very large shoebox full of cassette tapes into the garbage can at my mother's house. You don't understand. Not just original cassette tapes. Mix tapes. During the peak hipster era of High Fidelity and Say Anything (much older, because yes we were already rehashing nostalgia), I committed a high crime against art and Xennial self-determination. I remember neither the context of the conflict, nor why I desired so strongly to sabotage myself. Was it later than then? Had I moved out again? Was it closer to 2008? I couldn't tell you. But I knew I was on one of my decluttering kicks. Inasmuch as I am messy and allow things to pile up (hopefully not to a hoarderly level) I have also gotten on occasionally forceful kicks of throwing my possessions away. Mostly because they reminded me of a part of myself that was over. Around this same time I think I dumped all the handwritten letters between me and beloved friends be...
Read more

Dream Brother

Twin seeds, planted in one long planter. Soon, a large landmass would stand between us. I wish I hadn't absorbed, from somewhere, that only the coasts mattered. And here we are. So much between us, including life & water under the bridge. I miss New York but I'm not built to root there. Just to visit. I think there was a time in my life when going there could've propelled me. They would've "gotten" what I was doing. But that was a small window of time. Now it's over. So much similar between us but so many parts of us different. And yet so much in common too. It feels like long ago but hey, obvious why we were pretty much "The Crayons" together. The queers in the 'burbs claw in the dark to find each other. Our absurd reads, endless summers and maybe the mystery trousers left in my trunk. Beach days, then you moved out right after we graduated. Things got tangible quickly. We did grownup things at 18 in a state where you didn't have to...
Read more