Not much this month, but I didn’t want it to be nothing.

“For the Wicked”
Though a diary lay strewn across the hard surface of the scratched mahogany table, he did not read it.
Though its contents contained secrets of the utmost importance, assuredly to be lost to the ages, it was of little consequence.
Though he knew there’d be no stiff reprimand for turning even but one of its pages, he turned away.

The boy, or a man if he was that, was little more than a sinner like all who came before him.
Whether he could yodel with the best of them or mend clothing in minutes, his footprints remained but a blight upon the surface of the fallow Earth. Or so at least it felt.
More importantly, it was snowing.

A friend had asked one time, while walking to no place in particular, what he’d wanted to be when he grew up.
The question seemed silly.
As though he’d not been alive all this time, as though his life would soon receive some meaning once he’d made a decision he would no doubt change.
The smell of Sunday morning biscuits and gravy sizzling on a hot skillet seemed somehow more appealing.

There was a dream or a vision in which a careless funeral procession clumsily ambled along, with no great effort, to deliver the atheist’s body to the churchyard.
Upon arrival, an array of chairs stood neatly aligned next to a fresh rectangular hole, accompanied only by like bedfellows and the workers that tended to them.
No widows mourned, no children wept. Yet the sun still shone.

In youth he did many things.
He made mud pies by the dozens, he defended his alcoholic mother from less-than-kind suitors.
He served at the shelter on Saturday, he cut himself the rest of the week.
He cut himself most of the week, but he served at the shelter on Saturday.

It was Tuesday now, some five of fifty years later.
He still sometimes rests his head within the tall ferns of cloud-gazing hill, just waiting to see long-forgotten heroes as they drift on by. Perhaps they’d see him too.
Is he still as much the bastard he was, even if all bastarding has long since ceased?
If it follows a heartbeat, does it ever really cease?

Next to his bed, in a room reeking of 409, now stands a hospital monitor beside a single drawing in a cracked, faded frame.
Some might say the thing’s important, like they say all things are important, but he seems rather tired and might do better with a nap.
There were many days when these kinds of things mattered, by they’re too long ago;
when understanding that a blip means he lives, while a line means—

—

Note: for anyone going through a wicked hard time and having scary thoughts, please check out https://twloha.com, talk to someone, or just get out and get some fresh air. Something.
Do something to get out of your head for a bit and try to find something better.
Always Keep Fighting.