An Urge for its Day

One day he watched it all melt away. He knew what was happening and he did not try to stop it. First his bed went. It started up in flames, which burned themselves through until a sort of liquid plastic eased up to the surface. It kept deflating. He patted it once in the middle to see what it felt like. It felt like plastic. Nothing like his sleeping pad he'd spent the last nine years on.

Next went all the gifts his mother had given him. These he watched more carefully. All the stuffed toys he was not ashamed to bring along into adulthood. Of course he cared. He saw his mother in them and saw the care she'd taken to choose them. He imagined her in the store, requesting the bunny with rainbow striped eggs sewn into its feet, floppy ears on its head, from its perch about one and one half persons high into the air. All along she wondered how he would hold it, if he would like it. Was it what she wanted for him? She held it by its ears, spun it around and thought it would fit just fine into the next care package sent. She especially liked its big, brown eyes that reminded her of his. He did not want to watch this one leave. But he had to. He swore to never look away from the pain, never to back down from fulfilling what was being asked of him in any moment. The bunny split, as if rent in two, right between the eyes. One half fell, turning to mist before reaching the floor, the the other half stayed merely flat on his desk, big brown eye still taking in the world.

Pictures of his family he could not see go. Unfinished business was left. Touching them, hoping to spare them of a boiling, mysterious heat, his finger was burned, singed off the top. It is not right for this to be gone! Hand held up, the picture breathing flame, he took his fist and plunged it straight into the frame. The flame bellowed its thanks and burned through his whole hand, past the wrist. Exorcising rage and pain all across the room, he made dents where he could, and tossed other things on the fire. Those books of his, the music, the shelves, the journals, the thoughts, the memories, the embarrassments, the times as they were.

On the edge of it all he sat and watched. And wondered what to do next.