The air is incredibly thin. I can’t breathe, and my hands are shaking.
When I was a boy, a playmate hit me in the head with a glass ashtray.
In an instant, my father had snatched the boy up and carried him ****** outside, suspended by one ankle.
I’ve heard also, stories of my great-uncles two brothers, run out of Saint Louis County because they’d fought in and been banned from every tavern on both sides of every main drag, of every township therein.
Maybe that’s where this comes from.
There is a fire inside that most days is only embers, but stokes far too easily into infernal inferno.
The grey mush in my skull is jacked into some electricity with jumper-cables made from too many sour thoughts, a fierce depression, and huge piles of self-doubt.
Gladness, contentedness, feels like fraud, like failure, like not leaning into it sturdily enough. Like not staring into The Abyss hard enough.
It feels like obscenity to not see conflict, to not rail against some dark thing, some enemy.
In doing so is found the ability to feel like enough.