a boy

Mushroom flannel sheets, wind through cracks in bedroom windows, whistling radiator, dark, darkness, Spring a month away, not really, light creeps back in except not in the bones or heart, he feels pressure, on chest, heavy, not hopeful, not yet hopeless, but close, it's coming, old bedroom far away, never to be slept in again, on the radio, we all heard it, convicted, not yet sentenced, but sunshine will not crawl across a summer floor, not in this life, not in his life.

We sat at the same table drinking ten cent milk from little cardboard cartons, kindergarten.  Cookies too, a pack of six.  Snack cost twenty cents.  He had freckles.  He was short.  We lived near each other and walked home in the same direction, but not together.  He repeated a grade and so we didn't graduate high school together, but we walked home the same way, me carrying my french horn, walking past his house with the yellow ribbons tied out front on the trees. For whom?  There wasn't a war going on.  Someone said they were for his older brother, but I didn’t think that was really an answer.

He killed a man last year.  He thought it was a dream, he said.  Ten years addicted to pills and this was the last day he could manage, finally did not manage.  Stopped coping.  He owed the man money.  He owed him for pills.  Couldn’t have anymore, not until he paid.  No work.  Unhappy.  Addicted; he blamed it all on the one who wouldn’t give him the pills that day, his friend.  The one with the pills.  Oxy this.  Oxy that.  Narcotics.  Maine.  Despair.  He went in the truck, got a gun and shot the man.  Then went inside and took a lot of pills, hoping to die.  I wonder if he ever thought of when he was a little kid, those cardboard milk boxes and his quiet walks home from school alone?  I wonder what those yellow ribbons were for?  When he woke, having failed to kill himself,  (if he really wanted to die wouldn’t he have used the gun?)  he thought he had had a terrible dream … then he hoped like Hell that he had had a terrible dream.  He walked outside and was sick at what he saw.  He called the police; he said he did it.  They brought him to the jail, then to the hospital, then to the jail again.  He was in that hospital for a couple weeks, and I drove by everyday taking my daughter to school.  I thought of him and said a prayer.  What becomes of a soul who does that -- makes a tragic mistake?  He will go to prison.  But what about after that -- when he dies?  What happens then?

Samsara. There’s so much suffering it almost seems impossible to bear sometimes.  

We do bear it though, eventually.  

And we do come out clean after eons.