… Rough Ramblings

A rough paragraph that might make it into my book… I wrote this half asleep two nights ago, literally dreaming as I typed. When I woke up I didn’t think I had typed anything and then I looked down and saw this. No joke, it was one of the freakiest and most incredible moments of my life. I think I dreamt of a Carnival too, though I don’t know why I was typing at a carnival.  I apologize in advance for the poor grammar and writing mistakes, but I wanted to post this as is. This weekend I will most likely be snowed in my house, alone again. Maybe God will give me a chapter or two while I wait it out!

The move to my dad’s house has been an awkward one. He’s never home really, always with my step-mother to be, and so I’m alone, in the house I grew up in no less. I walk into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee, and watch shadows of my former self running through the house, a chubby boy chasing my brother, Nerf gun in hand, or I see myself kissing ex girlfriends on the couch, or sitting at the dinner table with a mom and dad that are still together. I look back and sigh, the phantoms commanding my attention more than the mug of coffee I’m sipping. The hot black liquid spills on my hand. Damnit!  I turn on the faucet and run cold water over the wound, but the physical pain is only a fraction of the pain I feel inside thinking about the past. And now I’m here to dismantle even more of that past, living in the home where the youthful sponge I was became so weighed down with dogma that it practically tore me in half. My heart is the Titanic, my life the iceberg, the greater portion of me bobbing on the surface before I completely sink to the bottom of the thick blackness of the Atlantic.

I wouldn’t be who I am if my family hadn’t fallen apart. I know this. I’d probably still be stuck in the church I was raised in. I try to see the good in the past, but it doesn’t make anything easier. Nothing about life is easy, I’ve found, but that’s okay. Twisted, but okay. I wonder what other phantoms my mind would chase in this house if I’d had more home, more normal, more opportunities to live in that blissful ignorance where I thought my parents infallible. It’s hard not to dwell on these things now, living at the scene of the crime.

(Copyright 2010 Timothy Kurek)

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