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 marking 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 possible. 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, can also be broken by grief.

I might weigh less, unburdened by the X’s and O’s of tired comeuppance, freeing myself of the voluminous notes outlining my imagined superiority.

I could see it going two ways.

In one scene, I dump the burdens 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 less animate, 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 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

TL,DR: the pantheon is fucking up by letting my son die and DJT live.

Ariadne. Where are you? I’m lost. Or is your thread–cheat only for male warriors with an agenda?

Eros? Have you lost your mind? Every memory of my departed son is saturated with love, I mean grief, I mean love.

Diana, could you please get it together and take down the orange beast who threatens the well-being of all? No need to offer his head on a platter, just slay the fucker. One arrow. Please.

Persephone! I saw you there at the edge of the field of summer, disappearing in one fell tug. Hades must’ve grabbed you by the ankles. I wonder does the violent descent get easier with practice?

Does love, I mean grief, I mean love, get easier with practice? And what even is practice? It’s temporal. It’s repetition across time.

All practice leads to death.

Chronos. Have you anything to say about the merciless rigors of time? You say you’re neutral but we all know you pal around with the Grim Reaper.

Why is that bloviated menace still alive while my handsome son with the gracious smile is not?

Maybe stumbling clueless through the labyrinth is the better way to go – every bruise informing the next direction. Go left! Bump. No, go right!

If Hades can steal a youthful girl for a season of rape, why can’t he kidnap an 80-year-old man and dish him some of his own medicine and by his own medicine I mean, of course, rape?

I thought you gods were into retribution, just and unjust punishments, and hungry sexual predation.

Just ask Leda. 

I swept dead leaves from the curb in preparation of this week’s storm. Heavy rain carries debris from the roadside and deposits it on the storm drain down the street. The innocent flow of water down the hill will create a lake if it’s clogged and if there’s a lake, there’s a good chance water will seep into our basement.

Some storms you can prepare for. Others, merely witness. 

To be present while one’s child, craftily and in mute despair, marches to his own self-inflicted death is a torture that I wish on no one. 

Well, maybe one someone, except that sick someone is so very without heart, I’m not sure that if his namesake offed himself he’d even care. I mean, the fat turd didn’t even attend the kid’s wedding.

Penelope wove and undid and wove and undid, sitting at the loom of worried expectation. She didn’t know if Odysseus, her somewhat scurrilous, conceited husband, would return.

When you read the epic poem knowing the outcome, the waiting seems trivial. We forget: she did not know.

Same with all those movies set in the early 40’s in France and England with a neighboring monster on a eugenic rampage. They did not know who would emerge the victor.

We did not know our son had bought a gun. We did not know he would really end his life. We worried and listened to the wind. We offered words of hope, delivered plates of apple slices with cinnamon.

He was having none of it. If he was Theseus, he would’ve run with unerring accuracy right into the maw of the monster. Go right! Yes, now go left!

That monster had been dogging him for years.

Sweeping up dead leaves is one thing, offering pumpkin bread and hugs to a high school friend of your dead son is another.

“We were a lot of us desperate,” he tells me. He tells me, “I went to Denver and I called and I called and he didn’t answer.”

This young man, now the age that my dead son will forever be, is getting married next year and even though I’ve only just met him, I want to be invited.

All the passages now foreclosed to our second born.

How do you even name your new circumstance? “Raised two boys. One of California, one formerly of Colorado.” That’s one new bio. That damn word count!

When the rain gets heavy this weekend, I will pray for my boy. Pray that he rests in the shelter of his own expanded self. Pray that the suffering he so doggedly encountered in life, has fallen away, leaving him pure essence, pure intelligence, pure heart.

America is dying by suicide too by the way.

So go ahead, put our dear leader’s name on the Ford Theater and then maybe by some mojo or other, he’ll share Lincoln’s demise. Can I even say that here or will some Palantir search engine find me and take me down?

Ask me if I care, Athena, but perhaps lend me your shield.