It was your God, wasn’t it?

A ritual turned to a riptide, it pulled you from us.

“This is not you, it’s not you” I would whisper, clutching my own hands in something of my own kind of prayer while you tore through the skeleton of the house.
Furniture collided with bodies. When consciousness would escape your skull, you would spill your vacant body across the torn leather couch. Across from it was the old family portrait, resembling then a hellfire.

You would face it with a bottle in your hand– your rosary.

You carried the weight of us on your neck, and no one taught you how to let your breath carry you through the bites of the daggers in your spine. So you did it alone with the moon, in the bars and on the curb, while all who you carry slept.

I know, I know. Swallowing felt liberating and right, it must have felt like love. But all along it was the one swallowing you.

It was your God, wasn’t it? I know, I know. But was it fair that it swallowed us too?

Nevertheless, you are home for Easter. Your hair has grown, and you smell like nothing, and they’re the first things I notice about you. Our sugar-faced golden retriever whips her decaying hips back and forth as she weaves between your legs– she remembers you.

I realize the darkness hanging under eyes was never scarred there.

Welcome home, it’s silent at the dining table but not in the way it used to be.
It will never be fair, all that your worship, your disease, took from you.

It will never be fair that we grieved your murder while the killer was something nobody could see, nobody could scold,
nobody could stab.

It will never be fair, but tonight at the dining table there is seltzer in a wine glass and forgiveness floating in the air between us.

It is Easter, and tonight we celebrate that resurrection is possible.