johnke.me

Beautiful writing that had me sobbing more than once. This gets my highest recommendation.

Highlights

What we learned as kids, I have tried to shed like the skin of a snake, though I know it well still. Know it is embedded in my heart, in the hearts of many of us from that town. In penance, I try to present something else. Something lucid and buoyant. Overcompensating for an unintentionally felonious past. I hold on to the hope that contrition is fixed within the steps of the very walk itself. Each step, an apology. A million apologies. I want to kiss the foreheads of everyone I see.

On the car ride home, I sat in the back next to him and held his hand. A hand I should have held much earlier. Later, at home, I heard him tell my mom, Craig held my hand. He was crying. This dumb thing, this holding of an old man’s hand. I knew he would soon be gone (and he was).

Keep walking, keep walking. I haven’t turned toward your murder in decades, yet it lives in a small box in a windowless room down a dark hallway in the back of my mind. Emits faint noises daily. A blue house in the wild, synapses kicked loose, a peek inside that box

For too long, he says, the church made this world out to be the place of sin with the wonder stashed up above, when the wonder lay here before us all along.

Stack a thousand moments like this together and you might begin to heal a heart, domesticate the feral among us.

A swell of love—the precise amount of love a child needs to thrive—expands across the universe to Andromeda

Village or town or city, makes no difference, elementary-school kids walk as elementary-school kids walk. They have nowhere to be and nowhere they want to be but in the walk. Supple bodies bending and twisting as they shuffle forward, jumping, crouching low, pushing one another over, bouncing back up. They walk, and don’t even know it as walking. In this way, they are ideal walkers, and have found the true walk. Their walk is a walk of peace, of a collective social decision to allow it to happen.

But we didn’t learn. We were alone. The whole town was alone, abandoned by the greater whole. Now, I’m truly alone. Left it all behind. Walked so far from where we began. My strategy: the walk. The simplest strategy. Thirty years later and I’m still operating on scarcity, still trying to put in the distance between then and now. As if there would never be enough steps. As if that town could reach out and grab me and pull me back at any moment.