Raymond, Remembered

A phone call late Halloween night can reduce your head to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire creeping slowly down your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places.

How much more can fall off this planet before it just floats free of its orbit and rolls off into the coldest, deepest reaches of space?

It’s hard to love breathing things.

We stood out there in the rain, up to our ankles in mud, burying that dog who had found his lucky place in the world, and who was every day a reminder of how much one beating heart can add to the complicated equation that is living.

The collar on the kitchen table. The photos on the refrigerator. The rumpled blankets in the corner. The strewn, chewable things. That hole in the ground.

I have had days and nights when a dog was the only lamp by which I could make my way through this world, when the adoring eyes of that one serious responsibility were the only solid indicator that I had any business being alive and provided the only certainty that I belonged. Every single day that you are tangled up and bound with gravity on this planet and can feel yourself beloved, necessary for even one creature’s happiness, is a gift.

Still, you never stop being afraid of the gray takeaway boys. They’re always out there in the night, sleepless, leaning on their shovels.

The music doesn’t work, even as a distraction, can’t stop all the feelings your head keeps forcing down your throat like a series of bowling balls. But, come on, listen to Al Green and tell me what you have against this world.

What choice do you really have?

You do have a choice, certainly. You have choices, options.

But for at least one more day you’ll open the blinds on another bruised morning and live.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

–George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi”