My endings were never clean. Always an unraveling. Always, the threads of my bliss fraying toward uncertainty. Like those last days of August when you reach wildly back toward the warm womb of June. Let me back in. Shine down on me again, for I am not yet ready for the cold. Everything is, after all, uncertain. And change is a bitch.
I met Husk in a strawberry field in Pennsylvania. He was wiping juice from his bristly chin and talking to himself, on his knees before the fruit. He always did think himself a holy man. In my experience, most men do.
“Gotta get back,” I heard him saying. “Have to. Will.”
Conviction appeals to me. Always has, mostly on account of my flagrant lack thereof. If you’ve never had much luck with faith, it helps to latch onto someone with a lot of it. They’ll pull you back and send you flying like an arrow. Swish. Now you have direction, momentum, an adopted purpose. I call it spiritual hitchhiking. Word to the wise.
As it happened, I was in that field because it looked like a good place to call it in. Lay down and give it all up. I’d just lost everything but my name and my grandpa’s silver watch to a two-bit, two-timing son of a bitch with a very dexterous tongue. He had conviction too but the other kind. The stain-your-teeth-green-from-wanting-the-wrong-things kind. After him, I learned to tell the difference, mostly.
