'A Pondering of Velocity When you’re too Scared to Move' by Tommy Dean

My son stands at the end of the driveway, the tip of his rubber soles balancing in the shadow between roadway and cracked cement. Safety an invisible line I think, I demand, I can control by saying, “Be careful”, but the wind, the universe, the controlling variables of our lives, don’t give a fuck, so I count the steps in my mind, brace myself to sprint, holding back my body, because this is independence, this imaginary tether I’ve created, a facsimile of trust, when why would I ever let him go? The road is too scary, a version of a video game, where we don’t respawn, we don’t rematerialized to make the same mistakes again, where we learn the algorithm of nature, of drivers distracted by another algorithm of beeps and chimes, alerts of someone asking for money, wanting attention, that dammit this driver can’t afford to give in this tensed second of my son’s life, of my life, a patterned doomsday of coiled muscled emotion that borders on mania, released in the fragile prayer, of being careful. A haunting from the living, those ten feet that one day I’ll never bridge, or jump, or stumble through, or climb, or plow ahead, hands on my knees, a gap yawning.