Our Favorite Boots

Let the hammer drop. Let the clamoring stop. We've been too long drinking at the fountain of their fatal dispositions. We've been tripped up by the inquisition, which sent them first to trap us, and then to let us die, while we chewed through our own legs, like wolves caught in the deadly and vicious steel teeth left laying hidden in the autumn leaves, quietly, just beneath the surface. It's not so much the remembrance of that time that bothers us, as the fact that it never goes away. We have the scars to validate our feelings. We have the blood soaked ground laying wet beneath us every waking moment. It takes no other form. It’s always dark, and damp. We have the misplaced, but sacred, empathy given by the nurses in the head asylums, the state institutions of higher learning, the chemical lobotomy shops. The places they would take us to try and stop the bleeding. We have those memories, and those permanent marks on our records. It covers us like weeds while we’re busy sorting through the bone and sinew left protruding from these gaping wounds. We don't accept sympathy from others, we have quite enough of our very own. But we do accept their propositions. And we do reflect their pain.

It's not often that the bleeding stops, but when it does we each walk on our one good leg towards the coast, on our best crutch, with our favorite memories of our favorite boots. We stop in the bait and tackle shop along the way, and are reminded that the shoes of the fisherman's wife are really just some pretty jive-ass slippers waiting to be removed at the door of her, otherwise, vacant bedroom. Her husband doesn't know she has a thing for blood and bone.

We cannot continue to be afraid. The clowns running out of the room are scared as well, most of them anyway, but they continue to perform their act each and every day, without delay, under the scrutiny of a sea of watchful eyes, and on the ever shifting sand beneath a cloudless, and quivering, California sky. At least they never actually say they hate the people they’re trying to make laugh, even if they do. I know the distance between their face and the funny makeup is really much farther than one would ever imagine. We apply white face, and silly noses, ourselves each dawn before we fall, habitually, into line again for our own forlorn fashion shows. We’re relatively comfortable there. It feels, at times, like home.

The chill of disappointment only grows, it doesn’t ever go away. Still, we hope it will diminish, gracefully,
like the early morning darkness.