A fist. In it, stale air and a broken, cheap ring.

Here the treasure is letting go, fingers unfurling and letting the crap metal hit the floor.

I thought I was better than this.

How could I prize such junk and hold onto it so tightly? Grievance. Tallies of let downs. Replays of injurious conversations.  

Rather than squeezing my scoreboard in some imaginary race to virtue, I’d like to kneel beside a fast-moving mountain stream and drop my miseries in. I’d watch them be hurled away downstream before the plop of their landing even reached my ears.

I wonder how my heart would feel were such unloading habit. I mean the literal heart – the muscle which flutters now and then but mostly reliably pumps under my clavicle, sending oxygenated blood to the body and the brain. The anatomical heart, which by the way, is also broken.

I might weigh less, unburdened by the X’s and O’s of tired comeuppance and lectures from some perch of imagined superiority.

I could see it going two ways.

In one scene, I dump the burden and then leap up, aglow with freedom — the freedom to love, the freedom to imagine otherwise, the freedom to remember glad scenes.

In the other version, I tip from my squatting position headfirst into the rushing waters and surrender — a final ablution and why not?

Which is not to say I am nothing without my scabs and scars and still oozing wounds, but rather that once those patches and gashes of pain are rendered inanimate, maybe I could let go even more. 

I keep writing things that sound like I want to die and maybe I do, actually, but I am not suicidal. To the worrywarts in my circle, please note this critical difference.

Do I hear from my dead son?

Is that him in this feather or that owl hooting across the midnight hour? Do all these people claiming authority really know about life after death or do they just allow their wanting and their longing to get comfortable – here desperate ones, have a cup of coffee and a pillow and go ahead and speak as if you know something.

He still loves you, they say. He is constantly near, they say. Talk to him, they insist, he’s listening.

But what if silence is silence and silence is stripped of meaning, any and all autobiography and biography wiped away, and can be leant into hard but not for comfort and certainly not with any expectation of a voice rising up out of it and easing my devastation.

What if silence is his final gift?

My ears are ringing these days. Ring! Ring! Probably too much sugar or vinegar or coffee or who knows what. Early, midday, late, this slight rushing in the head makes me feel as if I traverse a long, long tunnel inhabited only by my fearful body and a malignant wind.

Makes silence feel like a pretty good gift, actually.

Can I plug my ears and hold my nose and go underwater somewhere and let the undead haggle over my soul and be born again? 

Not in that way, but in some way — where the only anointing would be done with silence?

The silence he created by leaving. The silence crafted by his departure. The silence he left me with.

Written to a prompt on 10/13/26