The Tall Dresser

The Tall Dresser

Year Zero

Simple, inane and all to latent, I remember being in your room looking at the yellow walls and reading all the misspelled obscenities' to lewd proposals all scrawled in sharpie to the phone number of the local radio station that would play drunken voicemails live on air. It was all to visceral and in the middle of it all the focal point of my eye was your dresser all to top heavy and also rigid. It lacked any real beauty. In contrast to the small vase with a singular marigold propped up barley high enough to crest above the top. I myself didn't know you at the time. It was warm not hot that summer, this was the first time in my life I had been in a girls bedroom, yet the glamor wasn't intimate nor licentious I was all to innocent. Just a third wheel who in later years became a second brother of yours. You dated my friend and I sat idling in a state of perpetual wonder, oblivious to what was actually happening on the bed behind me.

I'm standing in the the main meeting area of the church basement. There is a community of loners all disparaged by the past a mixture of violent nostalgia and what if's. The old saying "I think therefor I am" was all the more relevant to a bunch of men and women who went through hell in order to have a shot at a conventional, domestic life. My new friend Johnny likes tapioca pudding its a safety mechanism each meeting he shares a cup with me. I was the only one to take up his offer, Johnny has an eerie personality he looks all to clean to be here. Nobody trusted him, but I did since then were are chair mates. I like Johnny his story reminded me of myself then again each individual in this basement is one in the same that is with our genetics and upbringing Johnny on the other hand was an outlier he had things that only some of us could never achieve, yet one night his then girlfriend who he loved and had been with for a while fell ill from a bacterial infection and subsequently was hospitalized for months. All in which she went through significant and draining treatment. One night Johnny got on his motorcycle and rode out into the night. Now he eats tapioca pudding, he picked it up in his hospital stay. Johnny fuctions like you and I he just suffers from making bad decsions that affect his future. He likes to tell each new comer" It's not a matter if you go down, It's when you go down." Referring to motorcycle safety In all irony he does not seem to see the parallel in that saying. Not long after this Johnny's girl recovered but he never did he sustained a frontal lobe injury and began his decent into the bottle. I remember that's all it took for me too was a significant event. The danger of loosing a loved one and or the loss of a loved one. My mom was my anchor, she lived a empathic life full of compassion and in all terror she passed right before I could graduate high school from ALS. It was then I fell much like my chair buddy. Each and every night I remember you and all the things You've done for me it took a lot for me to know you cared. I remember the day you drove to pick me up from the hospital and took me back to my place. You helped me up the stairs. When I unlocked the door to my apartment I noticed a single marigold in a vase on my kitchen island. It was in that moment that my naivety and inane personality was more benevolent then anything I could have possibly accomplished. You are my family all it took was a flower much like for my friend Johnny all it took was for someone to eat pudding with in a smelly church basement. To this day I will cherish the unlikely absurdity of life.