‘If I’m not back this time tomorrow - carry on, carry on. Cause nothing really matters.’
As my car radio shifts to a piano interlude, my thoughts shift to you. We always leave a mark on the people we leave behind. I wish I could go back and tell you that things do matter. You mattered.
No, I can do better than that. Cliche.
Thinking about you makes me ache, your memory still bring tears now and again.
I’m still only going halfway. I can do better.
My baby sister brought you up in conversation this week. She remembers you as her friend that died, but she doesn’t really understand why or how. She just knows that you were sick for a long time and then she woke up one morning, and you were gone. When will she learn the truth? Will I have to tell her someday, years from now?
This life isn’t just any way the wind blows. Even if you say it doesn’t really matter to you, it does matter. It matters to me, to my baby sister, and deep down it matters to you too. It bothers me so much that your eternity is so uncertain to me. My stomach is full of lead when I think about the wasted time I spent around you, I should have tried harder. I shouldn’t have settled for the cliches of weather and how are things around the house? I shouldn’t have gone only halfway with you.
I can do better. I will do better.
I just wish I could’ve done better for you.
"It bothers me so much that your eternity is so uncertain to me."
ReplyDeleteJohn 3:16 seems to offer clarity here, though many smart and good people who call themselves followers of Christ are not reassured about their eternal reward by those words.
That verse says that ‘whosoever believes on Him shall have everlasting life.’ Another verse in Romans notes that ‘if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.’
ReplyDeleteBut I never actually asked this friend if he believed on the Lord, or if he confessed Christ as Savior.
I guess maybe I know the answer, but I hope I’m wrong.
Now, religion aside, when you get in a groove like this--something you don't do in your fiction--you really wail. And 'wail' in this context is good! Somewhere there is a fictional vehicle for you, closer to home than you usually find it, that will let you wail. This I believe.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by closer to home than I usually find it? I really want to find this groove in fiction.
ReplyDeleteCloser to home.... I'm thinking of your 'nonfiction,' and I put it in quotes because to me, it could easily become fiction. I'm not talking about the old standby 'write what you know' exactly, because, obviously and for example, you know something about canoes and the Allagash and something about romance.
ReplyDeleteBut when something stirs you up, like this piece or your report from the hospital intake, you write differently, more easily, more powerfully.
Oh, I think I see what you mean. So, in essence, writing for passion instead of story.
ReplyDeleteIf the choice is between story and passion, I'll take passion. Better than a choice, though, is a story told with passion or a story that makes the writer (and reader) passionate as it unfolds.
ReplyDeleteYour nonfiction has passion to burn (and I'll remind you of something a lot of non-Christians do not know: the original meaning of 'passion' was pain, as in Christ's passion.)