Stretched out on the carpeted floor as we share meaningless gossip, she falls into a pensive silence... I ask What's on your mind? Nothing, comes the reply, though nothing is the furthest thing from her mind and it shows plain as day.

I continue with a few probing questions - Is it about me? Something you'd forgotten? She shakes her head and sighs. I see that she's in her own little somewhere, so I trace little patterns on the thick plush carpet. She watches me - I start with random things, and they become little hearts of varying shapes and sizes. I see that she's watching and, embarrassed, I look back up.

She looks at me with those incredible hazel eyes, and I realize I'm in that little somewhere too. She moves, and a moment later I find her cuddled against my side. I'm silent for a moment, but eventually fold my arms around her because I can see it's what she needs right then.

After a few moments, I tell her I'm sorry.... She asks why. I tell her it's because I can't be there for her like I should. My mind brings to my vision another girl, a girl I can never think of being without. She tells me that she doesn't care... She'll wait until I can be hers. She won't have anyone else. I silence her with a finger to her lips. No one deserves that pain.

I cannot love her.

And yet, I do.

It is nine in the morning and I'm hung over with fantastically throbbing lobes and probably almost broke and I think I gave someone my phone number last night and I slept only three hours and now - on Easter Sunday - at still nine in the morning someone have decided to take a probably trusty old chainsaw out of its hibernal retreat to let it taste a particularly feasty serving of crooked birch logs.

My neighbour is preparing his winter supply of luxurious logs to spend in the fireplace the professional mason built for him not long ago. He is doing this on a Sunday morning. Nine in the morning on Easter day, 40 metres away from his neighbour with the seriously engorged head who gave his phone number to someone last night.

In a short hour he will compete with the nearby church bells in the race to make my worn head explode into space like a water melon meeting up with a stick of dynamite and the yearning hands of an ordnance expert fresh out of the Explosives, Testosterone and You ground course.

I will not make him stop the instrument of hell so I can revere in hungover righteousness since I sincerely think a little suburbia anarchism is in order today. Sometimes I am just another borderline nutcase with a wish for sparks to fly. The last guy they reportedly nailed to a piece of wood for disturbing the peace is the reason they have washed their Swedish cars and taken off in force to swarm at the house of their God. Annoyingness is, after all, context sensitive.

Heathens get to stay home unshaven in the sofa and perhaps catch some rays of a late April sun reflecting off the pages of a thick enjoyable book they are trying to read in spite of dehydration and blurry vision. Yeah, and to operate noisy lumberjack tools.

This day - in the no man's land between sonorous church bells and a chainsaw sounding like it has Grace Jones' PMS - can only get better.

At least up until the point at which the phone rings and the number on the display is completely unknown to me. At that moment, I will realize what I was up to last night and cringe in the IKEA sofa, sit straight up, pause the episode of Band of Brothers I had planned to watch today and explain myself to the other end.

Unless, of course it's my mother calling from a payphone to inform me of some turbo pensioner activity involving long drives in little Korean cars or just to ask me how I am on a Sunday morning in the outskirts of the city that fell asleep sometime in the last century. She will of course know nothing about chainsaw hangovers, neighbours with ill winds to blow, church bells from the Twilight Zone and crumpled cash register receipts with some guys phone number on it. The real reason she calls every other Sunday morning is of course to find out if I leaned to the left or to the right on the 0330 bus home. I always provide her with great mysteries. Ha Ha.

The bells are calling the faithful to congregation now.

This is how I am going to spend my surreally hung over heathen Easter Sunday.

Until the phone rings.

At 10:09 this morning, one of my units was dispatched to a house here in Lutz for an unknown medical problem. Upon arriving on scene, the neighbor explained that she had made Easter baskets for everyone in the neighborhood, and went to deliver one to the house across the street. She knocked on the door but got no answer. Peeking inside she saw a little boy running around the house. She knocked on the window and told him to get his Mom to come open the door. He told her that his mom couldn't, she was dead.

Our unit, along with the Sheriff's office, forced entry into the house. They found this little boy's mother quite dead, brutally murdered with severe trauma to her head. In addition, this had not happened recently, at least 12 hours had passed by since she was killed.

Out of all the joy, all the love and forgiveness today is supposed to mean, I have never wanted to track someone down and kill them so badly in my life. We all have problems, but to do something like that, and leave a kid there, is just inexcusable.

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