Dear Hobgoblin

RECOVERY JOURNAL

March 9th 2019

Hobgoblin,

I made this bed and we’ve lay in it for too long, sweating and sputtering, your wickedness slipping inside my blessings. You turn to me and leer at me with dirty, failing teeth and I leer back. I gasp a little gasp and cough. Uh-huh, yeah. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and lie very still. 

I hear you, then, in the dripping of water, in the barking of dogs, in footfalls on the pavement outside 1-2, 1-2. In garbage trucks. In the muffled laughter of the neighbors through the wall. 

You come with false prophesy. You whisper lies, little lies and little lies and big lies. You shout at me in my head until I’m off my head and off my rocker and I rock, cringing, knees tucked to my chest, palms pressed against my ears and you won’t shut up.

You are indecent. You bring me perversions, first fresh then ripe then rotten. Ill-begotten. I suckle your sweet nectar ’til it turns sour, then I keep suckling because I’ve forgotten how to drink anything else.

But I’m starting to remember. 

I will rise from this bed, from this tangle of sheets and funk. I will open the windows and open the doors and go outside. At first I will stagger, then walk, then run. But it can’t stop there. Because when I go on a run, you catch me. Always, every time. And you drag be back to that room of tucked knees and cringing.

I will fly. Man can fly when that which lifts him is a power greater than himself, fly with fingertips spread whistling in the wind. And the wind and the dogs and the trucks and the laughter will tell the truth and I will laugh with the neighbors, laugh with everyone, cry with everyone, be with everyone in exuberant caterwauling congress.

You will hold no quarter then, for the quarter you hold will be that stinking room, the room I have as of this writing left. Goodbye and goodnight. This night, this greatest of nights, I don’t wish you farewell, for you’re not fair and I hope your well runs aching-bone dry. 

Don’t try to follow me. This time, for the first time, I’m not leaving you a trail of bread crumbs. I am up, up overhead. And up is not somewhere you know how to look.

Sincerely,

Benjamin