The Creaking

You always asked the same old questions; the ones with no answers. You’d blow ‘round these floorboards with the unrestrained fury of a man watching his harvest ablaze. Slight trembles--there were earthquakes in your knees that threatened to collapse the entirety of your being. Often I imagined that your eyes only ever saw the hurts in your life, as though there was a film blinding from the tempest all around. Those were the statue days. I’d taken to standing around mute, in awe of your spin cycle ways. With each jarring door explosion announcing your plagued conquest of another day, I honestly tried to scrap together some empathy. Your battle hymn was turning into martyrdom, the cause of your destruction only ever burned in your bones. The soul of your sorrows was a private affair that bled through the cracks in your skull. I questioned if you rehearsed it. Plights like yours only ever arose from violently desperate minds.

With each blow of your tongue you struck dumb your fellow proletariat. On the soapbox of middleclass you wrought the irons of your life, with every tethered revolt scarring experience onto your brain. You always claimed, “This shaking keeps me steady”, it was like a tremulous metamorphosis permanently stunted. Somewhere beneath you were fixing your second skin. You harbored molting dreams that you coerced into epiphany. After awhile tragedy and pity decided to blur. You took this as a sign.

You talked for eons about the possibilities, painting dreams like stars on a bleeding canvas; your attempts to catch the plasma were cosmically futile. When days crawled into the “magnificently bad” you were staunch in your defeat. You wore the mantle of woe like a taut second skin. Those epiphanies that were broiling underneath were quenched in the lava of reality. It was these moments that seared me in sincerity. For all the balderdash of broken dreams, these moments bespoke vivid clarity. The pupils of your eyes became kernels of a pain feigned but not often felt. Brooding in the expanse of a life driven by the seismic pulls of survival, you clawed in untamed ferocity until your wounds seeped too copiously. In these stolen moments of actuality, when bullshit and pageantry momentarily subsided, that visceral bond that twines every member of a family--the erratic pulls of acidic churns and chest wrenching pains we associate with emotions-- it was then that the rollicking stream of existence quieted long enough for us to see into the abyss. What stared back was our precious impermanence.