God came to me last night with some questions about freedom. For instance, he said, what was the genie doing before Aladdin found the lamp in the cave of wonders? Or what does bangarang actually mean? This followed weeks of being shut in his room alone with his computer, sharing status updates from Upworthy, perusing pictures of celebrities without makeup, videos of kids starting their own 403(b)s. There's been a line out the door of people who want to talk with God about their mothers, about the White Sox, about the cucumbers they're growing in the garden by the church, but he's only interested in what's happening on YouTube, in liking status after status on the pages of people he barely knows. Yesterday, he was on the phone with Pastor Daniel for two hours asking questions about mirroring his desktop to the television before PD finally drove over and did the whole thing himself. "Don't you want to come outside for a while?" PD asked him as he twisted the last piece of cable. "Maybe take the dog for a walk? Read a book in the park?" "Not today," God told him before retweeting the hell out of #morningmotivation, leaving Pastor Daniel to clean up the mess of drywall dust and copper trimmings, to put the wire cutters back on the appropriate hook in the garage. We all want to tell God to knock it off, of course, to remind him of all the years he spent telling us to finally get on with something helpful, but that has never been our place. So instead we've sat for weeks in the living room around an unending game of shoots and ladders while he stays upstairs doling out encouraging compliments in Farmville, and spending all night watching excerpts from Good Will Hunting, trying to reinvent the world before someone else gets to it first.
BIO: Sarah Carson was born and raised in Michigan but now lives in Chicago with her dog, Amos. She is also the author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections: Poems in which You Die (BatCat Press, 2014) and Buick City (Mayapple Press, forthcoming 2015) Sometimes she blogs at sarahamycarson.wordpress.com.