The Buddha

I have a seven-year-old mancub. I also have a small collection of Buddha statues. When the little man was an even littler man, anything that was supposed to be human, but was in fact not human, wigged him out: statues, figurines, his grandmother's electronic Santa with the moving arm... after an (ill-advised) visit to the art museum at the age of four, it turned out that even sarcophagi would do it.

I'm divorced, and his father and I share joint custody. So when the Bub was coming home, I'd have to move the Buddha statues out of sight. One particularly large one (about a foot and a half tall) really freaked him out. He's a fairly philosophical little shit (meant in the most affectionate possible way), and one day he was asking me about Jesus and God and whatnot. I tend to be pretty non-traditional and anti-organized religion, and take bits and pieces of philosophies that appeal to me to mold into my own personal ideology.

So we're having this chat, and finally it occurs to me that here's a way I can kill two birds with one stone: explain the basic concept of a God to a very small child, and stop having to move the damn statues constantly. So I told him that Jesus and God and the Buddha are all basically like superheros of the soul.

The Buddha statue has been sitting next to my front door, keeping watch, ever since.

and so we begin...

I leave a lot of things left unsaid in this life. I hold my heartbreaks close and my secrets closer, because I have always been the strong one, and the strong ones don't go around spilling their guts—they pay people to listen to that shit. But sometimes— sometimes—you have to let that shit out in order to let it go.