Bruise

The bruise I have a taste for pushing is watching the video of you at a birthday party four years ago. You're laugh catches, and rings in my ears like a brass bell, or reveille. Instantly making my eyes flicker and dance across the computer monitor trying to memorize the lines in your face, making sure I still don't forget them.
If it's a chain that binds me to the past, I'm not in a hurry to break it. If it's a signal beaming out to the world that I still hate nameless Supreme beings for taking you away, then so be it.
What gets me going on diatribes about God and politics is the fire that you gave me. The no bullshit, take-no-prisoners, sentimental Downy comforter repartee that weaves in and out both sober and drunken conversations. I hold it in. What gets me going on being able to stare at the setting horizon and not feel completely cynical, and grateful for the juice in my cup and the blood in my veins. Little moments, pouring out of my palms and into the cycle of the plants, and trees, and tiny bumblebees, all keep me marching to my own drum-set. As peculiar as it sounds, I can still hear you telling me to 'be a good girl'. I can still read the fine print at every contract because you told me to.
If you are still waiting for the Rapture in a few years and the nameless Supreme Being decides I won the spiritual lottery and I get to go to the clouds, I hope that the clouds have a pool table and you're playing. I can only imagine the intangible pub in the clouds. I can only resurface old wounds and hope the sky walkers bring me to your healing station.
As every day inches along and ends up coiling into tightly wound years and millenniums, and as he gives one thousand kisses and the night sky tickles my imagination; I say 'hey'. And somewhere I have to hope you are hearing me and saying it back to me.
I don’t ever want to lose the sun. Waving good-bye hurts worse than any needle, worse than any thing they could do to me. When it comes down to the wire, and its crunch time, the time where things are meant to happen or never, ever be mentioned again, I always come back to your face. I always come back to the words you liked to say, to the way you gave up at times, and they way you brought her carnations.
My whole thought process to becoming an exceptional adult and a woman of promise is that never ending merry-go-round of making you proud. Are the attempts of trying to make you proud no different than those people in church, trying to make someone God they only vaguely believe in proud? Sometimes, I don’t believe in anything. Just when I wanted you to stay, you left. Just when I started tightening my grip on myself, learning how to handle left hand turns and launch out a hundred or more bullets from my mouth, the train left, with you on it. Through mountains and plains with cowboys worshipping the evening breaks in heat, and with horses frothing and kicking up dust, that belongs to men, you are a part of that dust now.
I’ve gone home. I’ve headed back to the beaches and the cobblestone streets. I even walked past pieces of whom I was and who you were. But you aren’t there. You are under her bed. You are in our heads. I asked the psychic if you were nearby, and she told me yes, but I know better. I’d rather not look through the dark and find a small light. If I had my choice, and I know I don’t, none of us – I’d look for a small haven of darkness in a room to bright to squint.
There are mirrors out there, and when they spread their wings and play their sad songs I open up my lungs and tell the universe what I want. I want to grow old now, listening to other people’s prayers only aid in my motivation to age. Breaking promises to stay on a path with a beer in one hand, and looking at for others? It’s just what I want to do now; I don’t care about others anymore.
But for now, the bruise I have a habit of pushing, is simply thinking of you. When I hear a joke, when I cook – when the moon goes behind the trees. It is all geometry, its all rules and unspoken wishes. When I look up to the sky, I don’t think Heaven is there. I don’t see past precipitation and lightning bugs. How desperate can the sun be if it is lies down and let’s the moon take over? Pretty desperate. Desperate for attention, for love, for the feeling of knowing it isn’t alone.
Through all of it, I still think you are behind my left shoulder.
At least, that’s where I hope you are.