InsaneJournal

Who: Jake R
What: A little reflection
When: Recently


He didn't stick around. Not in the little room that was crammed full, the smell of turpentine and paint real thick on sticky air. Breathing was real hard when you messy-cried until your face was all over wet, and your nose was thick with it, and that wasn't manly at all but he figured manly had been left behind because there wasn't no way of being exactly what his grandfather wanted.

No, Jake bailed. Didn't take a scrap with him, left behind the notebook that said his Aunt Clem was mad in that way his grandmother got, the kind that was slow burn and quiet and sad, and he couldn't reconcile that one bit with his grandmomma's brand of anger, the kind that was locked up in a book and prayers over food at night. There wasn't nothing that made a bit of sense no more, and his heart ached some for home, even if there wasn't nothing to go back to. He'd tried: to fix everything until he could go home but maybe it was just all broken, him along with it, and he'd never get to go back anyway, God punishing him some for leaving in the first place.

He went to Vegas. The city close enough on where he'd been last to think on home. It wasn't, the Strip made him think of his granddaddy's warnings about glitter and gold but he wandered because there wasn't no place else to go. Young, jeans and a shirt and cars slowed down some when they slid past, and there were other boys stood out on the side of the road, all over shiny clothes and fishnetting and stood together like they were waiting for those cars to come on by.

Either his grandparents were right: the people who'd loved him right up until he left, who had been his folks when his momma and Graham were gone and the folks at church who brought round pound-cake on Sunday and talked over tea on the porch, who remembered his name and smiled at him in the street - or everything he knew from home was backwards, was wrong. And there wasn't no way you could think that over unless you figured by his grandparents being backward, his aunts were calling him the same way. And any way you looked at it, Graham was there in the center, everything tangled around him and backwards. His mom, maybe Graham hadn't loved her as hard as he said he did, or maybe he had and he was confused. His grandmomma had said that to him, smoothed his hair out of his eyes with his back an angry comma on the bed, said he was confused and he knew better than to give into the Devil and that he just had to pray with God in his heart.

His tears, they dried sticky on his face and he walked until his sneakers rubbed, long enough for exhaustion to rub on in, like white over paint. It didn't make a lick more sense after all that walking, but Jake, he walked the one place he thought might explain it all until it was easy.

The church didn't look like the one back home but that was okay. It said church out front, clear as day and it was light cracking in the sky above by the time Jake dropped into a seat, put his head in his hands and waited for God to come calling, to tell him something that was true.

God didn't come, but a hand on his back and Jake turned up into the face of the pastor, who smiled real soft and held out a hand.