Hopeless

I sat in my mobile home. It didn’t feel like home anymore. I’d been so happy here, not a day earlier. Now I felt despair crawling over my skin, round the back of my eyes, through my scalp and through my chilling insides. I’d lost a girl I loved. Again. And this time we were supposed to have a child together but she had been taken away, so that the baby too could be taken away. And killed.

I stared at the TV and cried, slowly and quietly and at great length. I didn’t even need Balarubu. My love and my despair were so true, there was no room for anything else.

Could it be worse? The TV was interrupted to warn about a tornado sweeping South through Sonora that was due to sweep past the edge of Nogales later. Past my edge. Since I’d been here, I’d learned about the special relationship between Tornados and mobile homes. Some people called them Tornado magnets. They could be picked up like Maltesers with a straw, and as casually dropped, later, elsewhere, hard and sudden. I didn’t care. I should go somewhere safer but I couldn’t. If she wanted me, this was where she would find me.

I wanted her. I wanted our baby. We should, already, be on the LA shuttle, by tomorrow in New York maybe, making plans for our baby.

I couldn’t see where to go—what there was to go on for. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Neither had Angie. We hadn’t had sex. We’d really and truly made love. And our baby had done nothing wrong. It had taken longer than it should to get going with Angie because I’d spun her no silly tales, no lines, no dating bullshit. I’d flirted, I’d chatted, and I’d told the truth. Sometimes the truth can get in the way, and in its own way it had. It had slowed us, but it had meant what we had was true, because it had nothing in it but truth. For the first time I’d thought that maybe Balarubu was showing me some higher truth; that maybe truth wasn’t an impediment; that when you learned how to live with it, how to weave its patterns and how not to be afraid of it, that it would give you a better life.

So how did this fit in.

I sat back, crying, utterly indifferent to the proximity of the raging tornado.

Let it come.