Oblivion

I thought I had it all worked out.

Oblivion.

It had to be.  There’s no other way.

Even with the shadow that passed from hall to kitchen; the keys turned in the door; the footsteps on the stairs; the sigh; still, there was no other way.

Greene’s whiskey priest.  The unintentional handing-on of burden from one generation to the next.

I looked across the parquet floor at shoes shaped by vacant feet; the trolley with its sagging wheels and short cut dust; guitars shoved in the corner, acoustic, soundhole mute, skin scrubbed into strings and frets, remembering.

A different guitar 900 miles north, someone else’s skin, lying in the darkness of my mother’s loft.

The burden handed to my daughter and my son.

Oblivion seemed less certain: a luxury, a cop-out, disservice to the countless souls that passed this way in suffering and in wonder.

We know so very little.

But it dawned that at the core of this corruption lies a jewel.