I would like to be good.

I would like to be good. I would like to be someone who believes in something greater than the mythical silver lining, these small blessings. I would like to look at a child and love him because he is a child and he knows nothing of the world and this love would push me to do great things. I would like to look at women and not feel obliged to forgive them of their weaknesses. I would like to run into a man on a common street and then forget him the moment I turn the corner. I would like to be strong enough to be able to turn that corner. I would like to see my brother and realize how hungry he is, how he is collapsing into deceptive versions of kindness, time and time again, finding out that he has exchanged his eyes for something far less miraculous. I would like to seek out my father, who has been drunk all his life but never lets on. I would like to see him and I will run my hands gently over his face to let him know that I am a child, still, but with strange, almost incoherent needs. And I will suppose that he will understand and recognize me, inspite of his old rage, for he is more me than I am. I would like to visit my mother in her crumbling solitude. I would like to tell her that everything is not what it seems, that the world has turned me into something she might not be able to see fully. And in that warm and familiar place, I will nestle my head on her shoulder, the way I did when I was so much younger, when there was nothing else but love and warm soup on the table. I would like to skip the apologies and move on quickly to something true. I would tell her this and I would hear her talk softly about herself and her body would assume the blank spaces of what we've all forgotten, what we need to accept. This time, I would listen. I would be good.