Vigil

Here I sit at my desk, a beer and a candle lit, I am trying to figure out the unfigurable, trying to make sense of all the pieces of a horrible explosion. It is impossible. I cannot get my head around it. When I can clearly see something in my head, a facial expression, the sound of someone saying "hey Lee!," a child frolicking at the pool, a smile that's in the eyes as well as on the mouth, how can these people that I'm seeing be gone? How can Bryan, Kathy, and the girls be torn away from us all by another human being? What person could do such a thing, what person could take the lives of children as though they were nothing? There is no answer to this. Even when "justice" is brought, there will still never be a satisfactory answer. What brain holds the neurons and synapses that has brought a sledgehammer down on so many hearts, that has left us reeling in confusion?

I was alone at home yesterday, trying to digest everything. When I couldn't make it any further, I left and drove around the city. Then I headed across the river and went to the house. I didn't know what else to do. It was raining. I pulled up and parked on the wrong side of the street, got out and walked over to the tree in front of their house. It was encircled with bouquets of flowers, a few stuffed animals, and children's drawings in ziplock bags. It was the stuffed bunny and Pooh and Kitty that wrenched me, and the drawings...as much as we can't understand this, what about the children, what are they to make out of things? Perhaps they have a better sense of it, I don't know. Maybe magical thinking is the way to go for now, Mommy and Daddy and the girls are on a long trip....
A older gentleman neighbor came over at that point and asked me if I thought it would be okay to move the flowers and things to the porch. The police crime lab van was still there but I said that I didn't know why not. No one stopped us. I handled the plush animals as though they were glass, they were to me, and tucked them together, all touching, to the right of the front door. It made me think of when my sister and I were little and a thunderstorm came, we would go through our bedroom and make sure that all the stuffed animals were at least in pairs, the buddy system, so they wouldn't be so scared.

I paused, squatting on my heels after we had moved everything, and looked to my left. Front windows broken, police tape over them. Chairs, a glider, a small table with a small notebook on it, but mostly it was the hula hoop that I couldn't take my eyes off of. Half on the porch, half on the chair. Left in the way that a kid would cast it off before going inside. I never would have thought that a hula hoop could cover me in such a wet wool sweater of abject sadness. I cannot remove that sweater. I cannot censor the awful visions and fight to run them over with the memories and feelings of goodness, laughs, music, Kathy's smile and laugh, visiting her at Main St Grill back in the day, our time working together at the Feast, the lovely pies she made, visiting her at the newly minted World of Mirth when it was over top of Exile, buying the rubbery scorpion women to decorate my Christmas tree when I lived on Hanover Ave in my teeny tiny apartment.

I cannot remove the sweater.