Smoke

What's the point of being a hero when everyone thinks you're a villain?

Some people Are worthy of a bullet straight to the heart because that is where cruelty evolves into evil. Some humans aren't human at all, despite how they appear. Humanity is what lives inside people, harbored beneath skin, flesh, and bone.

My grandmother used to say God gives us drought years-years drained of happiness-to prepare us for bounteous times. I'm more than ready for bounty.

Right Here. Beside a living, breathing human being who cares for me. I can see it in the cool lagoons of his eyes, hear it in the timbre of his voice when he speaks my name. Right here. Where the warmth of his skin tempers the February cold and the thinnest beam of his inner light overcomes winter's pall. He is a candle in the wilderness. Right here. Where the omnipresent specter of death takes flight, awed by the power of the two of us, hearts beating in unison, as we stumble through the darkness toward one another.

Happiness is a bull's-eye, awaiting arrows of pain.

Home. What does it mean to me? Will I ever know home again?

Love is a pain in disguise, a scorpion lying in wait for just the right moment to strike and inject you with its poison before scuttling off into the shadows.

But if there is a hereafter, one my father has been welcomed into, it must be a godless wasteland.

I have no right to love you, but I do.

It's one thing to crave a shot of adventure, a taste of something new, and quite another to become immersed in the extraordinary, where you're not quite certain if you're safe or stuck in limbo.

Some people blunt such pain with dope or booze or a dive into madness, but I don't have such luxuries available to me.