Johanna Ziegler | The Important Part

i.

He trips over one of his sins today. Twists his ankle.
Confession is healing, but you don’t give him any ice packs.

He feels lighter but limps all the way home.

ii.

You count the hairs on his head, which goads him to yank them out. Clumps of hair behind the sofa. Who’s going to clean it up? It’s his hair, but you’re the one who started counting the strands like they’re casualties in the battle between you and him.

You reach for him again, but he swats at your hand.

iii.

Growing pains wake him up at midnight. Inside his palms, on the tops of his feet, flesh opens like taffy to make way for abstract thought, perspective, cynicism, and other adult things. The holes in his hands bleed out his belief, so he seals the skin back together with pushpins and tape.

While you answer other calls, he is his own first-aid kit.

iv.

He sends you invitations, hosting dinner parties where his friends pull apart your promises with forks and knives. They dine on your words for supper, poke at the pink flesh, barely cooked at all, and laugh at how such a great beast can be so easily tamed by their intellect.

The rain checks grow old. Infinitely available means infinitely occupied.

v.

The cherubim’s symphonies sour into the sound of building collapse and car crash. It’s the apocalypse. It’s the end time. Someone bites out a chunk of his leg, and he thinks how shocking it is to feel alive while he waits for his revelations. It’s the apocalypse. It’s the end of his time, and he’s checked all the boxes, but when he checks to see if he feels any different, he doesn’t.

He stands alone near the end of his road and wonders what he’s waiting for.

vi.

Part of him—the important part—begins to drift away. Maybe it finds you somewhere out there. Behind the sofa. At the dinner table. Near the end of the road.

It’s tiring to search for someone claiming to be right here.

vii.

He is the prince of pieces that you took from him that he gave to you, that you both agreed to let stand between you like a fractured two-way mirror you gaze through, wondering how you can reach the other.

I think he misses you. I can only assume you miss him too.