By C. Dale Young
But memory is the greatest lie of all. No,
correction: the greatest set of lies. Even the boy
who remembers his mother reading to him is
participating in lies. So it is that to recollect
God pinning me to the hospital bed,
His hands cruel against my chest, His beard
dangling only mere inches away from my lips,
the inability to move, the weight of Him
crushing me against the bed as He whispers
Who are you to question the Divine? is nothing more
than memory, a lie. The nerves in my neck and back
on fire, the prickly heat rippling through me like fire?
A lie. It was nothing more than the nerves misfiring.
The metal ring, the titanium ring around my head,
the halo was sadly, most definitely, not a lie.
One misfortune begets another. And all stories
of origin are lies that beget more lies. Three cracks
in the bone of the axis begets the halo. The halo
begets the state of stillness, or is that begat?
The stillness allows the wings to erupt uncontrollably
from my back. I like to think that this was the sequence
of events, injury-halo-stillness, that birthed the monster.
But that, too, is a lie. The wings had made themselves
known years earlier, had erupted to full span and withered
away many times before. Who am I to question the Divine?
Who am I to return to the scene armed with words
and bookish learning? I sit here now with the wings
about to rupture the tissues between my shoulder blades.
I want answers, meaning I want lies. I want lies.
I muck around in memory and find only lies.
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Adam and Katherine drove here in the rain on Thursday morning and we celebrated Purim by getting bagels and hamantaschen at Bagel City. I had no idea that chocolate-dipped marzipan hamantaschen existed and now they are my favorite food, even more than chocolate-dipped macaroons. I may become addicted! After lunch, Katherine and I did a Tyranitar raid, then we came back here and watched Avengers: Infinity War because she hadn't seen it (after a few minutes of One Night With the King, which we thought we might watch for Purim but not even John Rhys-Davies made it tolerable).
Adam drove Katherine to meet her father near his office before dinner (shish taouk and saffron rice for Nowruz), during which time Maryland's basketball team survived the first round of their NCAA tournament draw. After dinner, we watched The Orville, which I enjoyed though it was a straight-up TNG ripoff with a side plot about yet another addiction problem plaguing Moclans. Then we watched some more basketball until we realized it was going to run into Colbert's hour, sigh. Here are some photos from Brookside Gardens last weekend when there was a lot more sunshine than we've had on this first day of spring:
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