11:23 a.m. - 2005-09-15
More John Rant
John was a limb broken in several places. There were hairline fractures, such as the blow to his identity as male, father, husband. There were shatters and spurs to the bone of his soul. The essence of the life he had been lent by his God. She was from Argentina, his perp. She left him to dry on the vacant shores of self doubt. Sent him to anger management classes for her routine abuses. Played the card that no one should play. The hangman, beautiful and ominous. She stole his two children into the night, returning at her convenience to deposit them, eyes stuck together with sleep and clutching stuffed companions, on the doorstep of his single apartment in not the best part of town. Answering to "mom", she exercised her license to disrupt and torment the lives of three. Somehow, John retained the template of "daddy", simple and true. We met between personal wars, gravitating to the comfort of unspoken mutual pain. Together, we hobbled about. Planting roses. Attending spiritual talks. Sharing a hot dog. Together, we made almost a person if you counted the phantom limbs we each relied upon for balance. I was uncomfortable with John. He looked far too long into the abyss that was me. He seemed not to notice the way the electricity surrounding my form shrank from the nearness of his healing touch. The way I avoided the substance of our respective losses. And when my father died, that terrible and luminous night, it was John by my side. Making him a promise to watch over me in his stead. Days later, it was John carrying the box that contained my fallen hero that surreal March morning we cried in neat rows on the cut grass. It was John who took my mother to coif her hair in some semblance of normalcy when all was lost. Matter of factly, he caught the illusive words that completed her Sunday crosswords. Attempting to fit his body and soul into the hole that shrieked like a limb torn from the corpse that was our family, it was John all along. It was John.
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