“Goodbye Stephen” 

the words quiet like a secret, but arresting and firm like a juggernaut train going a 80 miles an hour straight into my chest. Train car after train car hitting me again and again like the waves of the sea, and me realizing this is it. There is no more. This is the end of her in my life. 

Cold wind searches our bodies, blowing our hair as we stood in the middle of the street, and my eyes are brought to bear with the sadness I was seeing in her eyes and the love that I wasn’t able to hold anymore. Not wanting the reality, the fight leaving my body, and unhappy resonants in the linear progression lingering for longer than I would like, I muster my own, 

“Goodbye…” 

that I mutter under my breath. 

I don’t want this. 

I never wanted anything like this to happen, and now I’ve lost my best friend. 

The answers aren’t clear, but not because there aren’t answers. At any culmination in a breakup or relationship it’s easy to say “it’s complicated”, but a lot of times I don’t think it’s that complicated. When that kind of loss is laid plainly across the table the heart rips and atrophies, and subjectivity might as well have been made to walk the plank at 35,000 feet. 

I’m “in it”. 

Go get some sources on what actually happened, because right now my heart is pumping pain to every part of my body and my bearings aren’t steady. Every outpouring of sorrow and anger is permeated with the guttural “NO!” and “WHY!?” reverberating across my body to communicate to a God that I don’t love right now that I don’t approve of His methods. Those screams you heard in the night may have been mine, and the resolution was silence.

Trekking twenty miles on foot through frozen barren back roads of vast expanse I found myself alone amongst the cornfields of Ohio free to curse God, looking for a fight, as the pain of the run forced to the forefront those things I wished never to admit that were lodged and settled deep inside my belly. Blind rage worked its way up and out of my body, as I littered the road with the reasons I hated that strange Creator. There, in that place, in between the concrete, the running shoe, the sharp wind, the sharp tongue, on the visceral, desolate, dog-eat-dog plateau under the suffocating grey clouds that I feel I’m crushed beneath, I run, shaking my fist to the heavens as the only retaliation I know how to make in firm objection to how He’s created all things in this world, and in that seething hotbed of knives and viperous venom, God’s arms wrap around me, entering into my pain, comforting me. 

There like Judas, the Lord embraces me, holding me firm, as I move to put Him in His place and crucify Him. Opening up, He does quoth, “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me,” and I wishing to wash myself of Him cut back with despair, uttering Pilate’s nihilist defeat, “What is truth?” 

With those quick, choice words I hoped to usher in silence, and escape from His love. The Clouds open up, my body running beneath their face, screaming in rebuttal, “The truth will set you free!” Incurrent, the wind sweeps my body to ground, and I rip from my heart, “I don’t want freedom! I want to be enslaved! Tie me to the ground, because I am blocked at every way. I wanted her, and I wanted the ones before as well! I don’t want your love! I don’t want you! I hate you! I’ve always hated you! Free me from your grasp, from your conscience that is so installed in the drivers of my mind, unhinge me, and let me be free. Death despises the life that you bring, and I am a rubble heap hoping for more like me. Get back! Release! Unhinge me!”