The Room

There is someone here. I can feel their breathing against my back, the slow, spider-crawl of pressure walking down my spine. It is not just these words, fading and brittle, disappearing from the page, but anxiety’s algorithms dancing under my skin. Is this the divine? I’d pierce it, but I have not the tools to understand. I’m one of the countless, thoughtless damned.

When I was a child, my mother always took me to Church on Good Friday, to slowly walk along the pews, reciting the Stations of the Cross. Those simple figures–a piercing here, lamenting women over there, the rhythmic cues of staged agony–all these spoke to me in haunted murmers, a foreign language. Why should I care? I stood beneath the cross, staring at the bright red blood dripping down his foot from the metal nails, and I could never get past the pain, never reach the spirits that hid their secrets inside that polished wood. I just imagined that moment, almost sexual, when the nails went through the skin, and I wondered about the man who held the hammer. I wanted his courage. But he was not there.

A dead classmate. Hit by a car, or was it a truck, when he was nine. I had played with him during recess, eating soft pretzels and shoving each other on the asphalt parking lot, baking in our uniforms in the Maryland sun. At the service, a priest said he was playing with Jesus in heaven, and that he never had to worry about homework ever again. We planted a tree, but my memory had already begun its slow fade. Heavy clouds filled the sky, the late summer rain.