Embracing the Void
Reading late at night, not reading anything in particular, just going from news source to news source, web log to web log, musicians websites to tech websites encountering the flotsam of text that people write to sell things or to express their opinion. Why do I do it? Sleeping in the next room is the wonderful man who I want to spend my life with... Then why don't I spend tonight with him? Why not spend the nights with him?The void does not answer and neither do I.
Sarah Bettens sings "All of this past" in the wonderful raspy voice and minor key that she seems to control with rhythmic plodding so close to my soul.
The Philadelphia air is finally cooling down to be comfortable during the daytime. The summer's radiant heat is being blown out to sea on a cool breeze. Soon the few trees in the city will begin to lose their leaves and the northern winds will come from my frozen Midwest to bring snow upon these eastern states.
I miss my father. He lives, but I am not there to smile upon his face and to make him remember the continuing bittersweet moments of life.
I sit in a sort of amputated solace, in a sort of space that I don't understand: not waiting for death, nor embracing life.
Oliver, I miss your weathered skin and your cold blue eyes. Let's box a bit Dad, let me hug you and mess up your hair the way I wish the older brother I never had would have done to me as a boy. I miss the family I remember that I can never have again. Sisters busy with new babies and parents now happiest in the mantle of grandparents and I am 30 and not a boy but I act like one. I want to look into your eyes and let you know how much I adore you and how much I always adored you even when I was hiding from you under my bed swearing to myself about how much I hatred you. I hated you because you did not seem to love me back, but I know now that you did, just not the way I wanted you to.
When I am your age Oliver I won't have a son or daughters or Eloise to nurse me in the hospital. I won't have you either, as you shall be then a memory to me and a heap of bones delicately placed into the earth. I'll be alone with those beeping machines, Dad those machines monitoring blood oxygen and heart rate and such. I won't have family pulling me back from the grave the way you did. It's because I am selfish Dad, selfish and lazy. I will not have children because I am selfish and between Jason and me, we don't have a womb to spare.
You like it when I am there with you but I also tire you and tax your mind because I question all those things that you believe are true. I do not believe in a Virgin Birth or a resurrection or the infallibility of Pope and President. Eventually you will tire of me and I feel again rejected and worthless and wonder why I left Jason to come be with you.
Here I sit in the deep of the night writing things I will never speak to your living ears. What a son I am and what a lover.
JB aka JayBee created this post at 3:29 AM.
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