I wanted to try. I really did. All the sorrow just became so cumbersome after a while so I let it down for a spell. I laid it on the side of the road like a bag of kittens. Thankfully, a kind family of suburbanites strolling through the country picked them up in their station wagon. Happy endings always last this way.
Sometimes, I dump my psyche out like jigsaw puzzle on a counter top. I pay more attention to the cardboard dust left in the box. The colorful pieces laying in their own shadows meander a glimpse. I make the border first.
Then, I find the similar pieces. I look at the box. I see a barn and sunflowers and the sky. I see an abandoned mill near a railroad track inside, but I won’t utter a word of any of it on account of all the grasshoppers that no one ever flushed into the wind. They are the dots in the puzzle of my.
I hear clocks tick and accordion measures like my father used to play.
My Godmother, Aunt Dorothy told me this story about three years after my father died. She told me a story about taking my father, her younger brother by six years, to accordion lessons on the North Side from their South West bungalow in Summit. They had to take three buses. Every week for no reason at all except for this story, and all the songs my father never played on the accordion.
As the puzzle snaps together, I realize that far too many pieces are missing. The middle of the barn is there, but all the scaffolding we forgot lies in the middle of the reeds that done overgrown the ravine out back. I’ve always lived in a city, so I don’t know much about all of this.
Instead, I pretend that everything is all right. I act like my heart doesn’t ache and that I don’t wait every day until night. Night, when I can drink and forget about waning the day away. I roll like the cork of an empty bottle of wine.
Instead, consider the alternative: Waiting until the end and breaking into the afterlife like a hero. Standing around with all the other poor slobs that never finished their puzzle either. Getting a chance to meet an employee of the maker. Pleading your case. Not getting into heaven, but getting another go round of life. Another go round at life.
Ask the employee of the maker of your past life,
”Was I meant to save the world?”
”I’ll tell you what I tell every body else, “ Says the employee,
“All of you were meant to save the world, just everyone thinks it’s not them.”