The man shakes as he speaks his words more transparent than his presence. His needs outweigh his wants by now, but it is all trivial in the end. We wanders from table to table on the outdoor patio. He wants someone to listen to him. “God is good,” I can hear him say from the next table over. He has a speech rambling in his head only the audience isn’t willing to listen. He is off to another table talking to himself as he goes along. Explaining his speech on deaf ears and intoxicated minds. Taking the appropriate amount of time with each thought, each word as though anything he has to say is important. A girl at the next table goes down the rabbit hole with him, but she soon comes up for air and walks away. So he moves on. He is a disciple of God he proclaims as he reaches my table. I inherit my new role in all of this with grace. Something is off about him and I don’t think it is the alcohol. Jesus he repeats. He is the disciple of Jesus not God. Though Jesus is God he explains. He seems confused as to what even he is saying as he says it, but I listen all the same. Who am I to turn away a fellow story teller? He engages with everyone at my table. More so than I have for the past few minutes. He takes a seat in the empty chair at our table. Uninvited but not pushed away. He found what he was looking for in us. An audience who can’t look away. He sets the scene, lays out the characters, and tells us his tale. A tale of heart break, a tale of pain. It is a story that is easy to judge after the fact, but you know that during it all there was, was pain. Love is fickle in that way. Intense, everlasting, all that there is, and after a time it is nothing at all. A mistake, a bad decision, a waste of time, but for some that time never ends even after the fact. Insert Bobby, insert God, and insert the reason he sits before us today. Drinking is not new to him. Drinking and science is what lead him here today, but like most people around these parts God showed him the way. A woman left, the woman left him he stresses with every little detail. He was sad so he drank. Tried to drink the pain away. He was successful for a moment in time. Only he tried to do something else that night, drive home. Illegal enough of an activity to call his actions stupid, irresponsible, dangerous, and yet we haven’t even gotten to all the details. Drinking plus heartbreak plus speed can only equal one thing to most of us. Lucky to make it out of the wreck alive if not destroyed. Lucky that no one else was hurt or anywhere near his selfish act. Bobby found something he didn’t know he was missing until then. Bobby found God or so his story goes. As he thanked him with a prayer between sips of beer. Didn’t thank science or the doctors. He didn’t thank the people around him that took care of him while he recovered from the horrible accident that left him with irreversible brain damage. No he thanked God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. He finishes his beer and gets up from the chair. Asks if we found Jesus? Before wandering off once again. In search of a new audience to hear the same speech repeating in his head.
This one is pretty dark… very different… and Bobby very much exists… I meet him for a brief moment… almost seven years ago… while going through my notes I found my notes on the evening… my friend at the table told me after he left… that this would be a good story… so I wrote some notes down… left it at that for almost a decade… one because I buried the notes… and two because I didn’t know how to approach the story…
It isn’t my style… especially back then… back then I had no style… but I knew that, that wasn’t the style I was going for… recently I had a change of heart… I found the notes and I set out to finish it… it isn’t long and it isn’t epic… but it is real… I don’t know if Bobby still walks the earth telling his tale… I hope so… but just in case… here it is…
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