The Rosary hanging from the door handle

Careless Thoughts

A Bad Memoir of Little Memories

 

Let me tell you about the guy I once knew named Kyle.

                He was an oddity in my life –

                Which I guess, I am the same in some people lives –

                But I guess it a good thing for him to be peculiarity to me because I'll never forget him.

                This week has been hard for me. I have been spending most of the time wrestling with God on what I’m going to do with myself. What is the next step? You called me to follow this path, but all the doors on the path are starting to shut on me … or are they? Am I foolishness thinking I shouldn’t be on this path, and You, Lord, are trying to push me back on it?

                These questions have been plaguing my week. Day and night, the weight of these questions has been pushing down on me, and I’m starting to lose my health under them. I’m not sure what to do.

                I’m not sure where to go.

                I’m not ready to fail again, only to pick myself back up –

                                With Your help –

                                                But it is still hard – rough – painfully at best –

                And all the while, as I am wrestling with the Lord, I am looking back at the places I have come from. The people who are forever sketched onto my mind build into my story as characters. Time has done its deed to dull these faces, wash them out a bit, but the marks are forever inked onto my story. Every word printed on the pages of my life has their mark, ghost or hint of them hanging on the letters.

                The Rosary hanging from my bedroom door is one of those marks left by Kyle.

                I walked into Kyle’s house when I was in high school. At least, I believed it was his house or his mother’s house, but either way, I and a group of friends came in to find him on the floor, cutting up a pile of Converses. He had gone around to all the Goodwills in the area, buying up old Converses and was now cutting them up to make boots from them. The boots went halfway up his shins when they were done. I had seen him many times make his own clothes.

                Kyle –

                His friends as well –

                Were what I called Punks. I mean, they were Punk like straight from the movie SLC Punks. Not so much in the idea of music, they didn’t care what you listen to as long as it was good, but in the concept of Punk.

                You know, “Fuck the system, man,” was the motto of the Shed Kids of the Punks in my hometown. They didn’t care what system was in place, even if it was a system they liked because at the core of the belief all systems become corrupt with power.

                These people, my friends at the time, were what John Stew Mill would call the ‘outsiders.’ Mill believed you should always have a group of people on the outside of the system to question the power of so said system …

                                                The Punks before they were Punks.

                Then again, I might be reading too much into my friend from back then. With time and age, I start to look for the underlying beliefs of people, but fate has worn down these people to poor intimations of who they once were. They might not even be what I remember …

                Kyle had been one of the core members of this group, but Kyle also had his own demons running around with him. Demons he didn’t have the tools to overcome, and we didn’t have the tools to help him. We couldn’t see those monsters until it was all too late. Not because we didn’t care, we all cared for each other, but it hard to help someone out of the dark when you are lost in it yourself.

                The blind leading the blind.

                And those demons Kyle carried around always put me on edge. I knew Kyle would never do anything to hurt me. He, for some odd reason, respected me, and he didn’t seem to want to hurt me. Then again, I don’t think he ever wanted to hurt anyone.

                He did hurt people.

                I saw him blow up on so many people.

                It put me on edge around him because I knew if he ever stepped over the line with me, there was no backing down with him. I would have to step over my own line. It would have been bad for everyone.

                The first story I heard about Kyle was when he lived up North. He was on a payphone, carrying a book bag full of pills when a homeless man tried to steal the bag. Kyle pulled out his knife -

                He didn’t know if he killed the man.

                He did hurt him.

                I’m still not sure the story is true, but everyone knew it, and everyone told it.      

                And yet, I knew – somehow – Kyle would never hurt me.

                In fact, one day, he came driving up on his moped to my house. He had never come to see me without anyone else, and it was weird for him to do so. It was simply him and me standing outside smoking cigarettes. He had heard I was having a hard year. My grandfather had died not too long ago. I started to take pills, the girl I liked was playing me, and I was failing school. Everything was falling apart around me, and I didn’t have the tools to fight off the demons in the shadows.

                “Here,” he said, smiling dressed in his hand made Punk clothes. He gave a Rosary, a dark wooden one with hints of red in it. “Put it on your door, man.”

                “For what?”

                “To keep the demons away.”

                Kyle climbed back on his moped and off he went –

                I had one more inaction with him alone, but most of my memories of him were with other people around. He never came back by my house, and I watched him go down the road holding the Rosary in my hand. I did as he said and hung from my door to keep the demons away.

                Years later, I got a phone call telling me Kyle had passed away. He has killed himself, took a hand full of pills, and tied a plastic bag around his head to make sure the job got done. Kyle didn’t do anything half-ass.

I hung up the phone feeling the color draining from the world and stared at the Rosary hanging from my door handle. I wonder – in a foolishness moment – if he needed it more than I did, but I guess it didn’t matter.

                I still hang a Rosary from my door –

                In honor of him?

                I don’t know –

                But maybe, mostly, to keep the demons at bay.