minimalism

Once, the old priest told him, "Do not fear. You are never alone. God promises that. God is with you.”

He loved the old priest and respected his life and work. 

He didn't have much use for his metaphysics, though. 

There was much more comfort in the priest's friendship than in words and ideas about God.

"Words and ideas, ideas and words," he thought. 

"They are worth so little, yet so much." 

They were. 

He remembered his childhood, when he was a boy in his first years of primary school. 

His mamí held his hand and led him over the threshold of the door of their small house toward his first day of school. 

He stopped suddenly, grabbed the door frame and exclaimed, 

"I'm only going to go to school to learn to write!"

After he learned to write, he wrote and thought and thought and wrote. 

His mamí, on the way to the garden to pick fruits and vegetables from the plants and vines and trees of the land, would find him beneath the apple tree beside the fence of the garden, writing.

His bony shoulders hunched over his notebook as if he were a human question mark.

His long fingers gripped around his pencil as if he were a human exclamation mark.

Writing the things he saw and heard and smelled and tasted and touched.

Writing the things he thought and felt.

His papí, on the way back from the fields, would find him on top of the giant rock in their yard, writing, his eyes to the sky as if he were seeing something others barely missed seeing, his ears to the ground as if he were hearing something others barely missed hearing.

Both his mamí and his papí saw that in these moments a soft light encircling his body, a faint halo that left his parents to wonder. 

For, even though they didn’t believe in the god of the church, they did look for evidence of god in the people, hoping against hope that god was real, that god was with them. 

"Perhaps god is here," they thought as they drifted off to sleep, worn from the work of planting, gathering, tending, and hoping, holding each other with calloused hands in stick thin arms with full hearts.

- trevor scott barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020