When I was young, my grandmother faked a heart attack as a joke.
6th grade was my earliest memory of wonderment about God. I knew inside that my morals could be in a better place, that I could and should be a better person, I don’t know if by standards a school bus can be considered a church, but it was the first time I really felt a want to communicate with God. Me and my mother don’t talk much. Not out of dislike, we just don’t. And so there are ghosts. And so there are beings in other places, like my mirror, which I finally began to look into again. And so I hope every poem to be a hymn, hanging like the wrists of us as we all are fish, trying to shoot ourselves inside of the barrel. A hope that I might hear something that will bring me to where I need to be, because if I can live with myself, then surely I can live with them. And when beds are made of pools of our past and we finally sleep sound, I hope I won’t of wasted away any final moments, will there be anyone left in the end?
When I was a kid, my grandmother faked a heart attack as a joke. I freaked out. A few years ago my great uncle found my grandmother on our couch, the hospital diagnosed her with diabetes and said that had it been another ten minutes, she would have died. I have never been so calm in my life. My grandmother has always been an angry person, but now when she yells, I can tell that it must be out of fear, when she speaks of me leaving, I can feel how it must wrench, like pipes, trying to fit sound too big for their bodies. Like a church organ, built for Heaven, but by someone who does not know its distance. I’m still not sure if a school bus can be considered a church, but my truck is a sanctuary on late nights when the jersey barriers on the side of the highway are promises that I want to make to myself, when I want an intersection to wrap around my body. I am wondering why I think about thinking about these things as if life were a faded photograph of eyes of universes already dead but pulling themselves apart trying to find the good things, I do see the good things. My mother is not a ghost story I cringe at over fires or flashlights. My mother is incredible. And yet I know, when my breath leaves me out of distrust of my will, when a stone is to be still over my head, the single thing I will feel distain over, is that I didn’t put in the effort to spend more time with her.