Crock Pot Closure

I told myself that if your car was in the driveway, I wasn’t going to drop off your crock pot.
I wanted to make sure you weren’t home, that there was no chance of awkward encounters. The point was not to chitchat, the point was to get this black, heavy thing out of my dining room, so I could instead put junk mail and bills in its place – normal life stuff.
People are poison. People poison themselves by reliving pain over and over in their minds until the actual events are saturated and dripping with anger. That’s where I’ve been lately – making small slices inside until each phrase, next to each insecurity becomes one giant wound. I’ve been cutting. I’ve been dreaming. I’ve been adding layers that never existed in the first place and I’ve been so hurt and angry with events I cannot control. Where is the line for a writer between reflection and negative obsession? And do many of us know when to stop?
Yes, I am a writer and writers are hungry for pain at times; it reveals the best and worst of us; it can spark our greatest work. But there is a point where our spirits are more important. I’m trying to make that choice today and tomorrow and the next day.
Human beings suffer. Right now my card is up, punched. I’m in it – never immune; I’m in the chair for another internal tattoo.
I had Phoenix’s “Love Like a Sunrise Pt. II” song turned up too loud. There’s something closing and triumphant about it. I turned on to your street, saw your car’s butt sticking out, stepped on the gas and drove past.
Then stopped.
Before the light there’s a choice to turn around – a small market parking lot with a pizza joint and an overpriced clothing store. I turned in. Turned off the car.

“Just do it so you don’t have to come back here.”
Walking up to your porch, the partially cleaned crock pot weighed down my hand like a dismembered head. Your children’s helmets were strewn about the ground.

I used to walk in without knocking; I used to feel comfortable, at home; I used to let your cat in; bring beer and hopefully happiness. The iris my mom shared with you were springing up in the yard – unbudded.

Your daughter wrote my name in chalk on the concrete once when she heard I was coming for dinner.
How quickly I’m washed away now. Disappeared and ghost-like. How quickly I’d become an intruder.

I placed the black porcelain in the middle – not too close to the door, not too close to the ledge – dropping it gently out of my life.