Everyday God

Can there be anything like a simple, pure act? A virtue like gentleness that doesn’t hurt anything?
My movements began to show stagnation and my speech to lisp as days passed. This was because opening the window unthinkingly, pulling up the zipper on my back, or peeling an onion — between such extremely everyday acts — I began to hear often unidentifiable screams. Was it that in opening the window, I’d also opened something stupendous? Was it that by pulling up the zipper, I’d also forcibly meshed together something — about which there was an eternal injunction against sealing — by making the aluminum teeth hold it fast? Or else, if gods are things that amorphously permeate our surroundings in innocuous form, by taking the skin off an onion, I must have committed the rude act of plucking the skull off one of them. Unlike a cutely hemstitched pity or sentimentality, of the sort of compassion and sorrow you might feel when you find the corpses of three ants stuck to the felt sole of your slipper, these screams assaulted me at any time, accompanied by a regret resembling a harrowing pain which, each time I took a step, created an irrecoverable distance between me and the world. Because I was breathing, careful not to make the slightest crack in the air, when I felt suffocated, I staggered out, panting, for oxygen which would kindly push into me like a violent man.
Already darkly, the shadow of the earth was falling on me. Despite the fact that it was a bright noon-day, my family often lost sight of me in the small garden.

EVERYDAY GOD