Phil's Story, Chapter 19

To Phil.

Phil, I tried my best. I’m not going to accept that ‘too much’ or ‘too little’, but in the months that have elapsed, and in all the years to come, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain why you did what you did, but I keep forgetting that wasn’t my commission. Still, I’m not going to make excuses for you. I’m not going to try and say that because of who you are, or what you went through, your final action was in any way justified. When you left I think you took a piece of me with you. Perhaps you were the one to separate the wheat from the chaff in my life… and it took the reaper’s blade to find something of worth in me. I’m sorry if there was more I could have said or done.

For what it’s worth I learned a lot from you. You taught me a lot through your life and your untimely death. I learned a lot about myself from spending time with you; so many times it was like seeing myself through a kaleidoscope. If I’m ever on the verge hereafter of following your footsteps, I’ll at least have this manuscript to look back upon, and I’m sure I’ll be able to re-evaluate things to a different end. I am going to write you into a world or two of my own, wherever I think you’d fit. I can’t promise you eternity, but I’ll try my best to provide you with a little bit of heaven.

As for your postscript regarding Angelica, that is the one request I refuse to fulfill. For two reasons: primarily because I haven’t seen her and I’m not looking. Secondly, I don’t think your intentions, restricted to the confines of that final goodbye, are as honorable as they appear. This is a perfect example of my unwillingness to look beyond humanity’s fallen state and see the good in people’s motives, but my giving Angelica any message would be futile at best, if not utterly destructive. I think she knows as much as she needs to, and that you’ve laden her with enough therapy bills (in due time), and that your final aside was more than likely the last tirade of your incarnate malice before he carried you with him to the grave.

I miss you sometimes. I don’t know if there will ever be a time when I’ll be over it, I hope there won’t. I have a lot of memories. Camping with the boys at the bay. All night road trips during god-forsaken storms. The improv club in college. The summers filled with basketball, biking, swimming, and the few parties we could muster. The time you shot me with the pellet gun. And of course there are the late night discussions when we solved all the problems of the world, and each other, over a hot cup of coffee (only to forget about our solutions by morning). There are always the cliffs. The risks, and the freedom that comes with them. If I find the spot from your dream, rest assured, I’ll jump. If I don’t… rest assured anyway. Rest in peace.

Church Hill Sonnets (II of VII)

Sonnet XLVII (Church Hill II)

I walk through the heavy, unlocked, oak door

Tapping a rhythm in case you are home.

I tiptoe past Woofy strewn on the floor,

Turn on the light and thereby cease to roam.

I breathe in the air thick with years gone by,

Taste lives past and smell who is yet to be.

I'm perched up on a limb, towering high,

Where generations have sat and dined free.

I remember faces of old and young

Embraced in communion; many made one.

With children instructed to hold their tongue

While Gramps told his stories of World War One.

All this remains a mystery to me,

The stranger who has climbed your family tree.

Phil's Story, Chapter 18

The Ticket.

Remember that speeding ticket the officer gave me in response to Phil’s… outspokenness? I pondered that ticket for a long time. The rest of that night was a write-off, even coffee. I kept looking at the ticket. I’d fold it up and stash it in my wallet only to pull it out five minutes later. I kept it at hand for weeks afterward. I still have it. Now it’s secured with other mementos from the past. From time to time I take it out and read it again. Simple advice that may seem cliché to some, but it sentenced me to life.

“Don’t fall into love. Let Love lift you. If truth sets us free how much more should true Love? It’s the look you had in your eyes that paid for this ticket. I understand your hurry; I’ve been married twenty-one years to the love of my life and no law could have kept me from her. It didn’t have to. The law could not keep us apart (1 Cor. 13). The sooner you tell her what you have to say, the sooner you’ll be less inclined to be in such a hurry, and more apt to squeeze every moment from every second she’s beside you and, consequently, the more you’ll see the sense in the good that presently seems obtrusive. This is your ticket of proof of Love’s redeeming nature. Hurry up and slow it down.”

I personally feel safer with officers like him patrolling the streets. Not because he let me off the fine and points… ok, maybe that plays an insignificant bonus in the story, but because I know what he fights for and I can believe in the law he upholds and the principle that is its foundation.

If it gives you a sense of justice or retribution I have been the recipient of speeding tickets since and have never tried to use love as an excuse. I don’t think of love as an excuse. I don’t think there are excuses in love. You can’t assign blame for an action motivated by love, because real Love is a God-given grace, undeserving and largely inexpressible… it upholds the highest, purest standards; no evil can be spawned by a truly loving design. On the flip side however, wherever the capacity to love exists, a choice has been extended, thus it is only through the choice available in the execution of love that evil is possible.

It all goes back to Eden. Regardless of your take of the validity of the story, the insight into human nature is so beautifully woven into the illustration of humanity’s struggle with will, that I can’t help but bring it up. But that last coffee with Frosty, I didn’t even have to bring it up. He read the ticket and his first words required no explanation; we’d been through this before.

“We were set up.”

Phil couldn’t get beyond this idea that the Creator of this depiction was a sadistic domino mastermind who after setting up his pieces, waited for the inevitable bumping of the table that would send them toppling over, and was thereby the cause of all the crap in the world… and why serve such a being?

“Without the facet of choice, love is impossible; God is love, so the ability to choose was a necessary aspect of God’s perfect creation.”

“That’s a cop out so you’ll be justified in your miserable life of constraint and moderation… I know, I grew up in it, I’m affected too.”

“I think it would be more comforting to dismiss it all as nonsense and live without the burden of consequence, either by a lack of authority, or the one I create for myself…”

“There aren’t any absolutes, Fost. No capital T truth.”

“Is that an absolute?”

“Shut up.”

I think we usually ended in stalemates, one telling the other to shut up.

“Not this time Phil, this is important. This is love and death… this is the essence of life… the gift of will and the grace to exercise it and choose between right and wrong. This is what makes it all worthwhile, the pain, because it opens the door to the possibilities of acquiring real joy and peace and comfort.”

He let that sink in.

“How.”

“It gives every decision we make power through our intrinsic worth as humans being.”

“Human beings.”

“No, humans being. We’re actively responsible in our fates through our being, whatever we may be.”

He looked at me and tried to quell whatever it was that I stirred up in him. He failed; it boiled over. I probably looked too smug to let it slide.

“That’s too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Too much hypocrisy from a guy who’ll sit through the movies you sit through and listen to the music you listen to and worst of all sit idly by musing over a stupid ticket while the girl of his dreams is off doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who God-knows-where by whatever grace God has bestowed upon this God-forsaken world with this so-called gift of choice. It’s too much.”

Ouch.

“Shut up.”

We passed some minutes in silence before he asked me that question that incessantly echoes throughout my mind as the big one where I dropped the ball.

“What would you die for, Foster?”

Sometimes I feel like a question asked is a trigger pulled. Words have power. I don’t know how much and that’s why I’m so wary of what I communicate vocally. I always made it a point to watch my mouth and speak as honestly as I can. There are degrees of honesty and I have no difficulty in telling people what I think, it’s sharing what I feel that kills me. I lied when I spouted off all of that rhetoric garbage about abstractions and their worth only because it was a plausible emotional deception. I should have just said what I felt like saying. I find myself in that predicament far too often.

Phil's Story, Chapter 17

Love.

As I write this, shrouded in a fragrant cluster of lilacs, in May, almost a year after Phil’s death, in Hope’s backyard, I have a familiar thought progression prompting me to write; it always begins with Hope. I’ve just spent thirty six consecutive hours with her. I came over last night with a chai, and we began talking. It was almost like having a cup of coffee with Phil… it was almost better… it was different though, not quite comparable. Anyway, we were up all night. Whispering when we could help it, trying to when we could not. She has left for work, and she’ll be tired, but that’s something she’s used to. I was recapping all of the open memories stored away, bottled up, still bubbling over from the conversations that jarred them, disturbed them, spilled them onto the table. I was thinking of how I’ve once again approached a place in a relationship where a choice is inevitably on the horizon. It’s a choice that has previously been answered for me by my neglecting to acknowledge it. It’s a frightening concept… it is the epitaph of hope… it is Love.

1 Corinthians 13 is merely a definition and definitions have little application in life circumstance. Definitions are absolutes. Absolutes, and justification in Scrabble or semantic arguments. Love is a very subjective term these days at any rate, thus hard to define. It's usually thought to be a feeling, and feelings are, by my own definition, largely indefinable. I think love is too often confused with passion, or lust, or sex. Things that the books and the words are inadequate in expressing. ‘Love’ is too, which is probably why it’s so readily confused with those lesser sentiments, but I think however you write it, say it, or other wise try to interpret it, apart from living it out everyday of your life, love is just too broad to be defined. God is Love. God is boundless in everything that is good. I think the same holds true for love… at least, capital ‘L’ Love.

Perhaps I’ve been too influenced by books and movies and songs. Maybe I am naïve to believe that such a thing exists, being God or Love, but I think some beliefs are to die for. I lose no great privilege should I be mistaken, but I forfeit all I hold dear if I’m right and I take a big enough step in the wrong direction… like off of a balcony.

I think the evidence for love lies in the ability to choose. Without choice, love can’t exist. Therefore love is in both act and intent; it requires both to be effectively demonstrated, even though it is often impossible for us to know what designs an action is built upon. It’s easy to discredit motives too; it’s easy to assume the lowest common denominator. I’m so skeptical that I can’t even believe I’m capable of believing that my motivations are what I wish they were. I want to be doing things for others. I want to die to myself and live a selfless existence and prove that it can be done and done well. I want to illustrate that happiness comes foremost in making others happy. I want to be set apart and different. I want to love the way I want to be loved. I want to give. I want to offer. I want to sacrifice. In so doing, I don’t want to expect a return. I want to be perfect… I want to follow the example. It’s so inconsistent a philosophy, so full of circular perplexities and so lacking proof I can’t help but get discouraged… it seems like even questioning it is to fail it… and I question everything. And yet, it’s so simple, so easy, when it’s approached one deed at a time, one person at a time.

I can choose.

Correction: I do choose. The only thing there is no choice in doing is choosing.

Unfortunately, I usually choose to oppose my lofty standards.

The truth is I have a lot to confess, especially if I’m going to see these daunting hopes in a less consuming light, but it’s not an easy thing to do or come to terms with. Sin is such a taboo subject… if it’s even thought to exist, but if choice exists, then sin does too. I’m a sinner, that goes without saying… and if I were really convinced of my own convictions, I’d probably have more resolve to change. We’re creatures of comfort and habit. We should be creatures of risk and spontaneity if we’re going to come close to realizing the potential life has to offer. I’d rather die young and in love than old and knowing that all my hopes are well beyond my anemic grasp; ideally though, to be old and in love, having loved every passing day so far as my strength would allow.

Presently I live in a claustrophobic terror... a long way from where I’d like to take up residence. For years now my greatest fear has been that I’m cursed to sow my judgments: all my relationships doomed to failure for those I’ve criticized, unable to escape the phantom of divorce that travels back through my family tree and rots it from root to bud, that pride will drag me down in all of its various forms, even that I’ll take my life because I can’t forgive my friend for taking his… it’s not even my wrong to forgive. There are days that I believe all of that, and days when I’ll only take on the latter. I think the time has come to put all such fears aside. We take upon ourselves so much weight, as though our own sins aren’t enough. It’s about time I come to admit that I can’t do everything myself. I need someone to help me sort through all of this garbage before I trip on it… and land too hard or too far to get back up. I need more than a Hope… I need a Love, because I can’t promise a just return… I can only promise all that I am and all that I’ll ever be.

Phil's Story, Chapter 16

Life.

Some people would say I haven’t lived. In many respects they’d be pretty accurate. There are a number of venues in life I have yet to experience and many I refuse to experience. Want a list?

I’ve never done drugs (with the exception of caffeine of course).

I’ve never smoked a cigarette.

I’ve never been drunk.

I’ve never broken a bone.

Here’s the kicker, for all my ideas of love and romance, for all the words, poetry and prose I read and write, for all the hopes, I’m ignorant… ignorant, naïve, inexperienced, unaccustomed, and absolutely and totally oblivious to any forms of intimacy. I have never so much as kissed someone in intimacy… yet. Then again, there’s more to intimacy than that.

Still, I don’t think that disqualifies me from the subject of life or love. I think that the honest approach of inexperience is capable of identifying profound truths. A number of philosophers throughout the ages would take issue with that I’m sure, but I’m not writing an essay, I’m writing an opinion. I’m writing an opinion compromised by biases and prejudices and pain and pleasure and a ton of experiences of varying magnitudes of which inexperience is a valid part; in fact, I'd go so far as to say there is no such thing as inexperience, as there is no such thing as darkness. Each only exists as an absence of something else, and in the case of experiences, their absence is often far more beneficial and constructive than their presence. Still, I’m writing the insignificant beliefs, ideas, standards, ‘whatevers' of a twenty-one year old university drop out. Actually, I have plans to drop back in, so that last statement might need amending. Nevertheless, I’m just one person, like everyone else who can still be reached in a one on one context. That isn’t everyone. Ideologies, ‘ism’s, factions, sects, dogmas, I can’t reach those… so that excludes some people who have succumbed to be the embodiment of such generalities.

I’m not knocking sensation, I’m not demeaning reason, I wish I could wed the two.

“Life isn’t all about experiences. There’s a higher purpose and it’s not fortune, it’s not fame, it’s not pleasure, it’s not highs, it’s not lows, it’s certainly not me… it’s you… and it‘s who lives within you.”

That’s what I want to be able to tell Hope. More so, I want to say it honestly. I want to live it. My life could end up being someone's story one day, but I’ll be the first to tell it, but not on paper. The first telling is living. If I speak too soon I’ll only draw a conclusion of hypocrisy.

I’ve sat up with Hope for hours talking about ideas; Life after death, human nature, free will versus determinism, pleasure or pain, nurture or nature, past present and future, I’ve treasured these discussions (arguments), for all that I’ve learned, and all I’ve reasoned, but more than them, I’ll covet the smells, the touches, the glimpses, the tastes, the sounds and the associations I’ve made that lead certain sensations to ignite specific thoughts and evoke particular feelings. I’ve woven a web I love to get tangled in… that I may weave it all again.

I don’t think life should be as complex as we make it. Standards exist, internal and external, and we have to live up to the set we acknowledge. The problem comes in meeting those people that make your present set seem inadequate.

I remember Phil telling me bits of pieces of his childhood, that which he remembered and that which his mother relayed to him, sometimes in a drunken stupor, so the fractured history is hardly gospel truth. He told me stories of men. His mother’s suitors that would call at all hours, show up with flowers and chocolate, and take his mother away… sometimes for days. He grew up feeling like a burden… an inconvenient load that, as a result, was often left behind. I know some people who would say that it was Dungeons and Dragons, or other role playing games that Phil got into during those absences, that killed him. Some would blame the one instance that one of his mom’s beau’s got violent… which is fact, the police have records of the assault that was spawned from ‘too much whining’, first four year old Phil’s and then his mom’s, not the ‘wining’ of the accountant. Phil grew to detest inconsistencies. He hated complications and factors and fractions and numbers and he loved the converging and merging and uniting and bringing together. Phil saw a movie once and had an epiphany… there was this line in it: “Just one thing…”. He took it literally and ever since he worshiped the idea of wholeness. He was active in his worship too.

When Phil met Angelica a whole new set of standards was birthed in him. I’m convinced that when Angelica met Phil she was faced with standards she never knew existed, and when she found out that she was the source of those standards, she was made to feel unworthy to the extent that she hated his purity and devotion towards her. I can imagine that being confronted with love is difficult, especially for those unaccustomed to what love really is. Phil’s last written words to me were ones that have haunted me ever since I’ve managed to put them into an applicable context…

“It’s too much.”

Church Hill Sonnets (I of VII)

Sonnet XXXVI (Church Hill I)

The decent down Church Hill is lined with trees

With their limbs stretched up to heaven in praise

They form a cathedral roof with a maze

Of boughs intertwined to catch the disease

That falls from the firmament to appease

The lusts of earthly thirsting hearts ablaze

As though this balm of rain would aptly raze

This passion that would incinerate seas.

Yet do I love without reason or rhyme;

In fact, all stands against this fire to try

To extinguish it with tears and a sigh

Before all is engulfed in fueling time.

The road I tread is dark. Too dark to see.

Maybe I’m wrong and there’s no fire in me.

Phil's Story, Chapter 15

Death.

My twelfth Christmas… it was actually the day after: Boxing Day; we were visiting my father’s side of the family. We pulled into the visitor’s parking lot at my relation’s apartment building. A police officer stood in the frigid outdoors guarding a blanketed bundle beside him. Throughout the day, between gifts and hugs and visiting, I sneaked peeks at the hustle and bustle of the different emergency personnel that had been converging in the lot while we celebrated. There was something that kept drawing me out to the balcony and kept pulling my gaze to the ground… it wasn’t gravity either, it was a far more powerful a force. And for a brief moment that morbid curiosity was satisfied. Some inspector must have arrived on the scene and the blankets were pulled away…

I heard later that the man who fell that day had slipped while trying to affix something back on the balcony above him. He had fallen some seventeen stories, nearly double Phil’s fatal decent, but it’s still his twisted corpse I visualize when I think of how Phil died. Unnaturally bent and twisted with a graphic display around him that I dare not try to capture in print. That remains the closest I’ve come to fatality… coffins are too far removed.

There are some things I need to come to terms with. There are also some terms I need to define. Ambiguity will ruin me. This is the epitaph of hope. Frosty died when he ceased to hope. I’ll die if I don’t cease to hope. Hope for me has always revolved around a person, rather, a relationship with a person. I named that person ‘Hope’ in order to protect myself. I can deny an identity if it remains anonymous. I can pretend that it won’t hurt should Hope read this and hate me for it, or laugh at it, or do anything but see the truth I’ve poured into it. Then I could pretend that she was not Hope at all…

All I really want is to be the me I am inside.

We, people in general, are a selfish lot. This is one vast generalization I’ll adhere to. There are no exceptions to selfishness, especially if Christ worshipped God and was who he said he was. Children don’t lose any time in learning what it means to possess. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I’ve seen too many smiles and tears evoked from the presence and absence of things. I think if we could learn to become selfless in our actions we would live in a perfect world. I’m an idealist, though. I aspire to absolutes, or my own understanding of objectivity, so I guess my Idealism may as well be selfishness. So might everything. That must be why it’s better to love than to deceive ourselves that selflessness is even possible of being a virtue worth practicing.

I moved a few months after Phil died. I was living at residence in school but the institution had administrative problems that led me discontinue my enrollment prematurely. I had lived with my mother for a few years and was planning to move in with my father after the school year. I ended up making the transition sooner than I had expected to.

I had lived in the same city for twenty years. I knew that place like the back of my hand. In my lifetime the population had probably doubled and the boundaries too. I lived in six different houses, three apartments, attended eight educational facilities, and probably as many religious ones in those twenty short years spanning my life thus far. Everyone I knew, everyone who knew me, my old workplaces, old hangouts, old everything, was left behind. When I left my mother on the porch she wept. I left all of my personal history without a second thought. It’s only hard to leave when you feel like you have a home. After Phil’s death a sense of urgency struck me. Not that Phil’s death drove me away or opened any doors, but it unearthed a sense of desperation that was in the process of surfacing for a long time. For years I’d felt like I didn’t belong. I tried to look ahead and remain occupied in studies or employment but everything just seemed so temporal and trivial. I graduated high school without any resounding milestones to mark my way, and proceeded to university as though it were just one of the innumerable roads to drudgery. My dime a dozen dreams of fortune and fame were being crushed under the burden of so-called reality. I was stuck in the mundane morose ‘real world’ and I knew that greater things existed elsewhere. I was lost in a labyrinth of directionless choices and futile opportunities and I knew that my only hope was to get away. Besides, Hope had my heart for months already, and if home is where your heart is, mine was nowhere near my place of residence. I risked my comfort for two reasons, hope and Hope.

I buried a lot with the handful of dirt I dropped on Phil’s coffin. I buried dreams and ideas, some of them have been resurrected to new life, some have been resurrected to new death, some have remained buried and some have yet to be buried. Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of an instant until we distance ourselves from it; time is a necessary spacer. Phil’s funeral was fairly quiet. No trumpets, bagpipes, or twenty-one gun salutes, no nationwide moment of silence, just bereaved relations, a few inconsolable classmates and a few like myself who stood in an eerie pensive confusion. It rained; even if it was only misty drizzle in the cemetery, there was a torrent in my head. It wasn’t fair. The world would never know him. The world would miss out on an incredible human being because it rained one day in May. Phil would have liked that. He would have come up with some diminishing perspective and reduced the whole fatal chain of events to the first drop of water that hit him on his way to work when ‘it was really coming down’. Phil loved the simplicity of confusion. He loved to pass over the grandest obstacles and lose himself in details. There is so much missing from his story. So much remains a mystery, to die with him. I didn’t even know whom to hate at the funeral; the only thing I knew about Angelica’s appearance was the color of her eyes. They were green. I looked around for the enchantress that bewitched my friend. I scanned in bitter frustration for the green-eyed monster that consumed this human sacrifice. She wasn’t there. I didn’t know many there, there weren’t many in the first place, but none of those who made an appearance was the siren Angelica.

When I thought about it I was astounded by how few people cared for the passing of a twenty-year-old out of this existence. The minister’s eulogy, taken from some manual for all occasions, book-marked and highlighted for service time-allotment, scripted between weddings and christenings, was an empty monotone oration. The songs, decided upon by Phil’s grandmother, were mumbled out of dusty hymnals, few knew the tunes. The people, faced with their own mortality and the ultimate illustration of the consequences of choice, were consumed with their loss and how this tragedy would affect their lives. Phil used to go on about how the system teaches us that the standard of worth in society is contribution. How our education equates worth with notoriety. That is such an inaccurate and unattainable standard for the majority of people who will live malcontented because they’ll torture themselves with overwhelming feelings of inadequacy for never being more. Still, I could almost picture Phil rising from the dead, by the hand of God, in answer to the prayer of some charismatic zealot, only to see his funeral and jump again.

“Popularity is no measure of worth, Phil.”

“Life is relationships.”

“Quality not quantity.”

“If someone couldn’t write a book about your life, it was wasted. I want people to know my story. I want there to be a story to tell.”

“There are only two people who will know my story: God, because I can’t help his reading it, and my wife, whoever she turns out to be, because she will be the only one to turn certain pages.”

“It’s funny… in this day and age you’re lucky if you get a moment of silence for your labors in life. I won’t be happy with less than a holiday… at the least nationwide news coverage.”

He said this with a cynical smile as if he knew he’d pass with less notice than the dying flame of a match. It’s only if you’re holding the match that you pay attention to the flame… and it’s usually the one holding the match that extinguishes it too… before they’re burnt. I’m sorry buddy, but it was a quiet event, open invitation, where few showed up. And you left your story in bad hands… I’m not worthy of articulating a life, let alone a life like yours… I can’t even live my own.

“If you’re not living you’re dying.”

Too many times we vowed to get busy living. Usually proceeding a bad movie or an evening spent witnessing an acquaintance’s binge at an excuse for alcohol consumption labeled a ‘party’. The problem was we couldn’t escape the parameters of living laid out for us… and we wanted to on several occasions; the parameters aren’t made with everyone in mind, regardless of how often we’re made to believe they are.

I think that the first step towards living is ridding ourselves of everyone else’s preconceptions of us, being those useless anxieties of expectation that lead us to examine our sorry selves in the mirror in search of our shortcomings; if we could free ourselves of those impositions then we might find our own worthwhile pursuits. I don’t know what dreams I’ll have tonight, or what they’ll birth tomorrow, but I won’t be defined in a day. I may never know who I am or all I’ll come to be; I think those questions may only be answered in how I’m remembered by the one who knows me, or in a compilation of all who knew me, but it is my sole ambition that one person will be able to answer that question by saying that I was her one and only truest love. That is the contribution I want to have on one solitary individual; I want to be the love of my love, the hope of Hope, the dream of my dream. That is the only thing that keeps the shell of faith and desire from cracking, under the pressures that the world brings, and spilling all I’ve held dear all over; the hope that my beloved is awaiting me with the same fervor I wait with.

It is my desire to know hope that I might discover love. It is a fear of mine that I’ll content myself with hope, and never pursue love, because of the inadequacies I see when I look at that image in the mirror. To be as honest as I’m capable of being, I don’t think I’m able to love myself until someone else sees something worth loving in me. I have yet to find it and I look. Every time I look in the mirror I scrutinize myself, inside and out, for the blemish or flaw that makes it impossible for me to accept admiration or encouragement or the intimacy of love that is my heart’s desire. I have difficulty accepting that someone else could love what I could not. Phil summed it up once while I was driving…

“Sometimes I think you’re naïve to believe in this reclusive Love, especially to the point of torturing, sorry, 'saving' yourself, for someone yet unknown…”

He was talking to me but I was pretending not to listen. He was looking at the speedometer while I lowered the window.

“Then I remember that you think speed limits are naïve, unjust, presuppositions enforced by pseudo authority figures and that that thought reassures you of some notion of a greater absolute and principles and truth and perfection and eternity, which in turn leads to the contemplation of the other virtues of peace and comfort and joy which all eventually leads back to God, and I know that you know that love must exist somewhere out there for those who believe in it and it’s that thought that sustains your will for another day without that which you so strongly desire.”

I just looked at him while he looked out of my window, to the officer, whom had just ambled into view and was now shining his flashlight throughout the interior of my car. I had been pulled over doing one hundred in a sixty. I put my head on the steering wheel. The cop looked at Phil and I in turn. Phil said afterward that his face looked like it was chiseled out of granite, I couldn’t say, I couldn’t look at him.

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Sir, the speed of thought cannot be measured.”

“I’m addressing the driver, son.”

“Sir, the one driving this car can only be reached through devoted prayer. My friend here was in communion with higher purposes.”

“Have you boys been drinking?”

“No, officer.”

I took the liberty of professing this much… I didn’t think Phil could keep my account balanced much longer.

“He’s lying, sir.”

I looked at Phil. In an instantaneous intoxicating fury, I yelled at him.

“What the hell are you doing!”

“You see, sir? He’s totally out of control, he’s gone, he’s wasted, he may as well have been drinking all night. He’s a wreck officer… he’s in love.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s in love, sir.”

“Let me get this straight, you were doing a hundred and three in a sixty zone because you’re in love?”

I looked at Phil. I swallowed, hard, and looked at the officer. Phil’s description was rather accurate; I was looking at the tombstone marking my open grave… and I jumped right in.

“If you knew her, officer… you’d know my hurry.”

He actually smiled. He checked himself and looked sternly again at both of us. Then he addressed me, all business.

“License and registration.”

The time for talk had passed, even Phil could sense as much. I handed the articles requested to the officer.

“Now don’t go anywhere…”

He said it almost playfully, like we were the toys. He turned around and started back to his cruiser. He was there for a good ten minutes before his flashlight bobbed back to my open window. Neither Phil nor myself had ventured anything but breathing for those ten minutes, only mine was considerably more irregular than Frosty’s. The cop handed back my license, intact, and registration, and a ticket, all in a neatly folded little package.

“Slow it down, boys, you’ll get where you want to go quicker if you get there alive.”

He drove away.

We stayed parked in the dark on the shoulder of the street in silence for another good fifteen minutes, expecting the cavalry.

“I think he bought it, Fost … you can go now.”

“I bought it, Phil… and I pray to God I can.”