the space above my ears.

Mourning Glory

I try to schedule my memories to appear at a certain time in the day or night.

Especially the one where I'm crying and clinging to the pretty boy and we're both breaking like teapots on the floor.

That one is always last before I fall asleep, and I have my reasons for that.

It's not the fact that I'm crying, it's the fact that he's crying, candy-apple-green eyes sparkling and scarred shoulders shaking.

Actually, it's not the fact that he's crying, it's the fact that he feels responsible for every dirty thing in the world.

And he doesn't deserve it, he doesn't deserve to carry the weight of everyone's faith with one half of his heart and the weight of everyone's doubt with the other half.

He's so tired and I can feel the cracks forming on his bones beneath his skin.

We go to sleep on the motel bed and don't talk about that night ever again.

Church, the next morning, I'm peeking over the back of the pew.

He's with his family toward the back of the chapel and he looks angry.

He didn't believe in angels until he fell in love with one and he'll never forgive heaven for letting that angel fall.

So he's here now, looking as if he's about to be sick from drinking the blood and consuming the body of what he is most furious with.

Nobody told him how hard it would be to forget the person who raised you from perdition.

We make eye contact and say things to each other without ever speaking.

We meet in the bathroom as the choir is singing about sacrifice, and I hold him steady as he chokes up all the things he didn't get a chance to say.

He says he is okay.

He is not.

In another era, he and his angel exchange letters every Thursday.

It's a sorry excuse for togetherness, but it holds together their unpredictable nervous systems.

I meet him at the bus stop and he seems a little less broken than yesterday.

He's still angry and so am I, but we take it one sleep cycle at a time.

Church gets easier and the guilt is metabolized.

It's a privilege, I say, picking up the pieces of someone so historically significant.

Reassembling them is the highest honor.

He punches me in the shoulder, cheeks turning red.

The books won't mention me, I add, but I'm in all the letters and I'm in your dreams.

I'll get to make the speech at the wedding dinner when at last you are smiling without sorrow behind your eyes.

And like before, we are crying together but this time it's because we made it, we're alive.

This is the memory I have when I wake up in the morning to remind myself that after the end of every day, another day comes and you have the potential to make a new world out of it.