There’s a certain weight that grows within your chest when your cousin appears wearing the image of an AR-15 within the silhouette of Texas on his heather gray T-Shirt and for months all you can think of is dying and you slowly become hardened by it and a fear and a pain cements there like a grit in the joints between your bones and you clench your teeth and you’ve noticed your gums bleeding and you taste it in your mouth like iron and you turn cold and sad and just oh so exhausted from watching the threads grow longer and the bottom feeders killing each other and the blood fills the tank and your other cousin tells you what your great-aunt said about you last summer and how she argued and said she’d never try to understand and didn’t care to anyway and after a while you just stopped even fighting it and when you float through the store like a specter you feel a small, welcome sense of relief because the employee who helped you had a layer beneath his voice that you recognize and as you trudge out into the baking, humid parking lot you think of hot, hot red, a beautiful flower you will only see once, deep red petals blooming through the thin white cotton of your T-Shirt, expanding slowly, steadily outwards and all you can do is watch and think oh how beautiful it is, the color red, and you think about the man in the parking lot killing you, or the man at the concert in the square, and you think about your cousin killing you and on the cusp of every thought, in every breath of consciousness, you glimpse into the cool glass of fear and stare into the scared eyes of your own mortality, the gentle breaths you take, so easily halted and you wonder how a heart can keep beating when such a tiredness overwhelms you, but not the kind of tiredness that dissipates into sleep, but the kind that aches your bones and curses you and brings you to your knees to cry “Oh God, why, why must I watch this all happen, how am I supposed to eat something that never goes down, swallow when it’s impossible to chew” but you sleep as much as you can and you hope that the countless nights will make it waver and every morning you eat your instant oatmeal, stirring in the boiling water but leaving it runny and you forget about it, but never for very long. No, never for very long.
E. Falter 2/1/25