Let the light in.

Can you do me a favor? Find me someone who knows all the answers to all the questions in the world, because I'm spilling over with questions like it's nobody's business.


The questions are stumbling from between my lips and bleeding onto the rug and running all around me and staining everything I own and everything everyone else owns, too. They're filling up the room like they're a bad dream and making me so claustrophobic. Everything is bloody with my questions and I don't handle blood very well.


The more blood, I don't know the answers, the more I get crazy, I don't know the answers, the more I write it across the tops of my finals papers, I don't know the answers, I scribble it through my directions to find f(g(x)), I don't know the answers, the dogs bark sad songs and sing me questions and I say to them, "I don't know the answers, dog."


I don't know the answers, dog.


So find me someone who knows all the answers. Find them for me, and send them to my house, and when I find them on my doorstep, I will throw the door open, "fingertips trembling," and let them in. I will sit them down and make them a cup of tea and I will hand them a list full of questions like, "How do I balance?" and "How can I always have good hair days?" and "Does he love me still?"


And I will say to them this: "Answer me this: Why do bad things happen to good people?" and I will wait for the answer.


Why do bad things happen to good people? Everyone says that at church, but the only answers I remember hearing are "pray, go to church, read your scriptures," which works a lot of times, but not for this, and I think I would remember if they'd told me the real answer. I'm sick of reading poems about it, no matter how good those poems are, and I'm sick of being sick about it. I just need an answer.


"Tell me how people live through it," I'll say, and they will tell me, because they have all the answers.


I will ask them that, and I hope they will tell me. I need to know, because what I know even now is that there is nothing that I can do to stop those things from happening. They will always happen -- I am not naïve enough to think they won't -- but if we knew why, maybe they would be easier for us to live through.


I just need answers. We need answers.


And they will let the light in, and I will never close the blinds again.


Bows and strings and holly and trees and lights.
All my love,
Addy