Hush

A few months after I graduated high school, back in 1992, one of the members of our graduating class bludgeoned his girlfriend and hid her body in the trunk of his Firebird. He was caught soon after and more or less readily confessed to the murder. No one knows why he did this. In school, he seemed happy, had a lot of friends, and was good looking. He was even somewhat of a class clown. Obviously more as going on than anyone could see. He's still in prison, as far as I know.

When I heard about it, this event deeply affected me. The area of Georgia that I grew up in was - and still is - a pretty insulated place. Grisly murders don't happen much in this corner of the world. The fact that I knew the perpetrator and, in fact, had known him and attended school with him since we were both small boys, made the murder seem even more random, more inexplicable, and more bizarre. I didn't know his girlfriend, but I had seen her before plenty of times. Her skin was the color of coffee with light cream. She was young and beautiful.

I was working at the restaurant that I'm working at now when this happened. And it just so happened that the boy and his family lived in a house visible from the highway that I traversed every day to get to work. And so whenever I'd drive to work, I'd see their house and my narcissistic teenager mind would be visited by intrusive thoughts about the bizarre murder, including disturbing images of the poor bludgeoned girl. Prior to the murder, I would just drive with the windows down, listening to Jane's Addiction, wondering if it was going to be a good day or a bad day at work. But now, having recently graduated and entered not only the "real world," but a "real world" where people you know can randomly kill innocent young women, even in these kindly hills, I had to face the growing sense that something like evil just might exist as a disembodied force in this world. Something that stalks the countryside and enters the hearts of the unfortunates...

In time, in order to preserve my sense that goodness still existed in spite of the evil things, I developed a way of coping. Whenever I'd drive by the boy's house, I would combat the intrusive thoughts by deliberately conjuring up an image of the dead girl in the trunk. Except now she was emanating a brilliant, copper-colored light. Her countenance was serene, and she looked at total peace and harmony. Saintlike. Her broken body, which apparently now caused her no pain, seemed somehow like the strange, angelic form of an ethereal being from another dimension. She spoke in a soft, content voice, free of any trace of confusion, fear, pain or destructive emotions. Her message - which she delivered as well as embodied - was clear: "We humans are much more than just these frail bodies. And all the fear and danger in the world, at the end of the day, could be just a strange grain of sand in an ocean of inconceivable beauty."

A few months later, I went off to college and forgot about that murder. Meanwhile, other things happened that occupied my attention - like the time me and my good friend Trevarius got stranded late one night in the middle of nowhere, Georgia on our way home for Fall break, when his car broke down outside of a redneck biker bar with rebel flags all over the place. Or when I became eerily infatuated with a pretty girl named Sabrina and thought I was actually going to go insane because I knew I couldn't have her. Things like that.

Anyway, today, on the way home from work, I saw that house and remembered everything. Other kinds of people find other ways to do it, but I've been using my imagination as a tool for survival for a very long time.