I come home one night after work dead tired and I climb the rickety stairs to the place where it all started. You and your daughter open the front door and we are painted in the yellow light of that old house, those old bulbs pour out around me on the cool damp wood of dusk on deck.
You had made a bowl of spaghetti, and opened a jar of sauce. It was steaming in a huge chipped glass bowl we had and a wooden spoon my mother gave us when this all started. I loved you so much and I felt you loved me, not knowing you were grasping at the sides of a hand dug bottomless well - holding anyone to break your fall - to keep you from your terror at it being just the two of you. 24 years ago, a quarter of a century. The lawn was kept, now ivy in it's wisdom covers all, yet those jagged rocks lay cool under its soft mounds.
It was a time before spaghetti wasn't enough. Before I wasn't enough. Before I bore you sons and fed them from my body in a warm nest feasting on sugar milk.
And yet somehow that simple kindness, that chipped bowl of pasta comes to haunt me now when I am dead tired and the stove is cold and I dine on dry toast and a piece of Land O Lakes cheese (cut thin). It is a lonely feast that I sustain myself with quietly in the steam of a memory that may have not happened at all, a kindness that may have not been real at all.
Ghosts that come to call at 3AM. And why have you come now Cruel Ghosts of Kindness? Why Your hive and swarm instead of the Ghosts of Terror?
I know what to do with terror. I can exist in terror for it is terror that made me strong. Kindness frightens me the most, guts me the most, leaves me crying like a child in the bathtub.
24 years ago...43 years to date...and still I cannot fucking sleep right.
