Last Night I Sang to the Monster

do that around here,” I said. “We smile for no reason.” I could tell I was beginning to freak her out.
“I need a cigarette,” she said.
“Listen,” I said, “be careful of the people in the smoking pit. Some of them have more than one person living inside them.”
She did not like that one bit. She just sort of stomped away. Look, I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. It was not a nice thing to wig a lady out who was obviously already wigged out. Not a nice thing. Still, I was sort of laughing to myself.
Later that day, I saw that lady get in a cab and leave. I saw her from the smoking pit.
“We lost another one,” Sharkey said. “If I had any brains I’d be getting in that cab with her.”
I wondered if Sharkey meant it. Maybe part of him wanted to just get the hell of out here. But the part that was staying, I was interested in that part of him.
This was my new theory: not everybody was interested in doing the work. Rafael said that change hurt like hell. I think Rafael would know. That guy is in some kind of pain. Sometimes it almost hurts me to look at him.
So even though not everyone stayed, me and Sharkey and Rafael, we stayed.

I am the owner of the happiest heart in all of God’s universe.

I am the owner of the happiest heart in all of God’s

universe.

I stared at all the names I’d written on the ground.

The earth had room for all our names.

I wondered if the earth was another name for God.

Remember remember remember. That was the word that came into my head. It was almost as if remember was a wind blowing through all the sad and dark corners of my body.

I closed my eyes and let the water rush over me and I wondered what it would be like to be as soft as water, to make people clean, to quench people’s thirst.

I’m thinking that if I can touch other people’s hurt and they can touch mine, then something might happen. Something really beautiful. I don’t mean that the hurt would disappear. I just mean that it might be possible to continue on the road toward a place called home.

Letting someone touch you in the place where it hurts the most, if I could do that, if I could just do that, well, that would mean I was alive.

I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.

I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel anything ever again. One minute I want to learn how to sing. The next minute I want to hate Rafael for reminding me that there are songs in the world