Grains of Paradise

“I told you, Bushmills is a proddy whiskey and Jameson is a Catholic one”.

“Whiskeys aren’t religious like people”….why do we believe the information we receive?

He told me that, way back when, the brain (not the mind) that knew everything, but broke down far too easily in the silence of its closed in waters. Now, I look like the asshole saying this, just drunk enough to try and remember if there was any backup information to go along with it. People really do say the damnedest things.

I once told a hairy Irishman that, who walked me home only to push me up against the side of the wall at the roundabout of the BQE (the most romantic spot there is, to some) to keep kissing me, his Rottweiler at his side; lumbering, silent and perplexed. The street was lit golden with dim, late night light, and moist air from the water breezing in.

He took himself out of me just in time, and I asked why he’d stopped. He said he wanted to take a precaution, since the obvious precaution wasn’t being taken (and which I hated taking; it’s like playing tennis in oven mitts…no good), and I kept repeating “we don’t have to worry about that with you…” He inquired, and got it again, quiet and oddly superstitious: “we don’t have to worry about that with you”.  Later on, he’d come to find out that I didn’t want to be a mother, then and there, nor achieve any other level of dastardly reproductive women doing/chance taking. Bushmills had made me say it. It had made me repeat it, and the back story of the facts in my head which did not mean the phrase spoken or the intent seemingly coming out of that (coming on the sheets below) didn’t make it out of my mouth before something else then made it in. That didn’t seem to bother him at all. 

Later on, I laughed and then I ruined it all, again. The dark place, the one coming all over me in dreams chuckled a bit, in a whispered tone to itself, when I thought I was beyond it all. I’m glad to say I nearly am. But, dear Reader, make sure you resurrect any parts of your life wherein you were not living out as yourself – they will form a legion of outbursts and wrongdoing, and find you, in the most inconvenient times, at the most inopportune moments…and they will gently remind you that they are not through with you just yet. Exorcisms aren’t pretty, but our eyes shine clear as Heaven when we make it though to the other side and the darkness falls away, for good and all.

I shouldn’t have trusted a Proddy whiskey from the North.

M. Lucia