Soon after dad was hospitalized,
you realized the amplitude of my
loneliness.
You saw how when the other kids went out to play I stayed to my lonesome, whether it be in the woods or in the basement.
So you took me to a tall brown building in town.
You never told me why, but there's no need.
I hated it.
I loathed looking into its lobby of mirrors that was made up of crying children who cant accept the fact that their parents are gone.
Of men that couldn't wrap their minds around the reality that it was their addictions that drove their families away.
So I hung myself on a noose of shame because I had become one of them.
You would then pull me up the elevator, through the hall, and into the
waiting room.
And it didn't matter how much time we spent, whether ten minutes or thirty because it always lasted an eternity. It was a living hell.
And if that's so then that makes the man who would delivered me from it
a god.
He only ever took me though, never you.
He took me to a child's heaven, shelves and boxes of all the action figures from all the popular movies. Except, he never let me touch them.
Instead he sat me at his desk and asked me questions.
He asked about you, about dad, about school.
But these questions only ever tightened the noose I had tied in the
waiting room, creating a lump in my throat too big to swallow.
He noticed this.
So he executed plan B.
He unveiled a small black square dish about the size of a CD case.
Its contents, white sand.
It was a miniature zen garden.
He then reveled a handful of small black rocks.
Hes said: "these rocks, they represent your problems,"
He handed me a small fork sized rake and continued,
"You just have to move them away"
So I pondered his words before answering his question
with a question of true sincerity;
"what does represent mean?"
Laughingly, he explained the words meaning to my seven year old vocabulary.
So I put rake to sand as if da Vinci to Mona Lisa,
only to create an abstract mess of sand and rock.
And so, I cried.
Somehow this method of therapy had been more efficient than his voice.
After we had left, I told you how I never wanted to go back there.
It took some convincing,
but eventually my complaining got the best of you.
You told me I would only have to go back once more,
there was a catch though.
A catch so hard to reel in I got teary eyed just thinking about it.
You made me say goodbye and thank you to all the workers.
Weather it be the the lady at the desk in the waiting room,
or the man who rescued me,
I couldn't hold back the tears
They came running down my face as if chased by the devil.
I hate myself for that day.
The day I became a black rock in someone else
*zen garden