Your dad said when you were a kid that your spirit was like a bucket of water. You needed to keep a continuous fresh stream of water running into the bucket to keep it clean. Bad influences were like mud and the only way to clean them out was to stream more water in. It was a metaphor for maintaining a relationship with god, but the one-sided nature of it meant you hung dearly onto the emptiness and space between any inputs or interests. You held space. When you liked a toy too much, it was taken away. In between disorienting waves of homeschooling, in your embarrassing brown clearance sweats, Hanes Her-Way, you tried to get the elastic cuffs to stay latched around the ankles of your bald LA gear hightops so they would resemble normal baggy pants but your legs were too long to maintain the connection when your knees bent. And in an unfamiliar cafeteria with distantly familiar faces you asked god if you should choose regular or chocolate milk today, heard no answer and went for the chocolate. You asked god for friends, but your constant internal state of asking kept you from interacting. Without answering you once, god made you self sufficient and disconnected. You floated above. Quietly charming benign psychopath. Later in life, in your dissociated freedom and untouchable neutrality, you listen to drone music and without meaning to, you hold the space your dad told you to hold. At your landscaping job, you drive the company truck solo and blast non-music, and nothing in reality holds a candle to the exquisite empty state of your divine mind. You poured all the water out of the bucket and tilted it in the summer sun until it was bone dry. The brittled plastic shattered and lost its blue hue in the winter sun, and a sourceless wind scattered it until it mingled with rocks and dirt and neighbors' grass clippings.