I found some underwear underneath my truck. The eastern sun barely even poking its head out of the slumberous stitches of its almighty comforter wrapped up in the west. Boxer-briefs that were not in good repair, mind you. They were a pair of underwear forgotten behind the dryer for years. A sock under the couch. A quarter at the bottom of a shoe box.
It was a pair of underwear that had circumnavigated the universe since the Cretaceous Era, only to plummet to Earth right on an early Monday morning, crash-landing underneath my truck’s front right fender between my vehicle and the western wall of my house. The serendipity of it all too much to bear.
I move my truck to put out the trash bins. And they just lay there, without their life, without their legs. And they just lay there, bereft, their legs cut out from under them. Gnarled from probably having lived 7 lifetimes on its Sunday Funday adventures, more than likely never having ventured farther than the 2-block radius of gay bars, of which my house’s parking is the nidus.
I see the Shorts’ mealy complexion, stuck with the morning dew and the mightly brew on the facie of the blue-grey cotton discarded for a resistant proprietor of a very odd lost and found. And the waistband is torn, ground into the gravel drive. Jostled about in the dead of night, your waistband dragged itself across the ground, hoping to find some solace in the end of the torment, but there’s no end to the nocturnal perturbations. The seat of the underwear is covered in dirt from an obstreperously stomping foot, curbed to the end of delights, for reasons unknown, in the season of woe. The cotton boxer brief sit lifeless, with its life force smashed out of it in this half-cocked burial. A lover tried to bury these boxer briefs. For, as the saying goes, funerals are for the living, not the dead. But who loved you in this way?
How this Mighty Pair might’ve gleamed powerfully in the night, floating toward the all-glorious halls of Valhalla. Oh, how, holey these Powerful Drawers contain the potency within. Nothing can surmount the parapets of the fortress of these underpants. Oh, without your Rubenesque balustrades, how do you stand so tall and with honor as you lay sprawled on the soil. You must be late for work now. It’s almost 7:30 in the morning. Do you need me to call you an Uber? You got too drunk last night and fell behind my truck, trying to curl up and hide. Just like our family dog Hunter hid before crawling underneath the house to die. As you hid you were afraid your friends finding you and convincing you to stay out. Then you simply fell asleep like you used to do when playing hide-and-go-seek as a child.
I know we’re strangers but you could’ve woken me up. I now awaken you, parched & bruised on the ground, awaiting your final redemption. I lend you a hand, outstretched as gently as possible so you know I’m not a threat. I embrace you like a long-lost brother. We ascend my staircase so I can bathe you in my clawfoot tub like the orphan child you have been relegated to. I sponge your back as you sit curled up in the tub. You have not returned to me, but I will be prodigal with you as if you were my own flesh and blood. I see blood speckled along the right leg. Born of your own inability to love, I can mother you until you are well, baby-birding food for you until you have recovered your strength.
You must miss your family. You miss all your loved ones. How have they all forsaken you? What cruelty has lead a beloved to leave their other half strewn to be stepped on and twisted into the ground. Who taught you to love and accept a love like that? And worst of all, you believe you deserve a love like that. By the beauty of your mere countenance and construct you have demonstrated your commitment to the core beliefs of humanity: covering our primitive ills with civility.
So as much as I want to embrace you, as much I want to cherish the fact that I’ve found you, I cannot. I must release you. I want to hold you so close, but this is not your path. I am not your savior. You are your own savior. As happy as I am to having had found. You haven’t even found yourself yet. I love you. So I cannot bear the burden of being your redeemer. I shall not save you, but set you afloat on the wings of an angel. The winds of Zephyrus, guiding you home to the sunset you always will search for in the dead of night.
I think I repaired you. That I fixed you.
But I didn’t.
I simply threw you away.
