imperfect prose on thursdays: on why i like sad stories

i can’t sleep for thinking about him, the little boy in Room, the one who eats from his meltedy spoon and sleeps in a wardrobe and believes the world consists of these four walls for a mother saving him from the germs beyond the door, and i can’t sleep for his five-year-old fictional voice

“why do you read such sad stories?” trent asks

and i don’t know what to say except, it’s the sad that makes God real

it’s not the insomnia; the tears splotching page, it’s knowing that where there’s sorrow, there’s soul… and soul makes life, with all of its “nothing”, worth it

soul is the bagpipes at a funeral, the child giving his ice cream cone to a beggar on the corner, the call of a crow swooping across empty field

and there is soul in the way this boy in his knee-less pants makes magic out of the objects in his room, out of the five books his mama reads him, over and over, out of the mouse that eats his bread crumbs, out of the blue of ‘outer space’ which he sees through his window

i lie awake feeling very alive while trenton breathes dreams

and it’s for this that Jesus, man of sorrows, drew near the paralytic and the zacchaeus and the bloodied woman, for the knowing that heaven can change everything, and that is why we are here

and why sad stories may be the only ones that truly matter

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