November 5, 2012

• a wife gone away

  Winter is coming. I can feel its deep Death wandering from faraway lands; he has left his home, he is on his way for me. He will be here soon.

  It is good to walk the snowy streets alone, to stop and stare at houses that do not stir. To be a sensory creature that knows its senses are alone. Your sniffling nose, your frozen feet, your view of the abandoned street of silent cars.

  I cannot wait to walk these streets alone.

  It is good to be away from everyone else, to feel how spiritually thin you naturally are without them. To find out how much of you is external validation, and how much of you comes from within. To wander around sick, weary, wondering and worrying. To hate everything, and to then love it all and hate yourself for adding to it the possibility of it being hated. For it is nothing but a stare; you are everything it ends up being, deep within you. The world is a chaos of interpretations and you are the only one you know is guilty.

  I don’t think anyone today experiences the story of Jesus because we already know what we are supposed to feel when we go to the text. We read it and as we are coming to the part about the cross we think ‘This is the part where he dies for me, and I am deeply grateful’. At this point in history you do not experience your own emotions about Jesus, you experience everyone else’s emotions about him. ‘I should kneel, I should worship, I should pray’ are translated as ‘I have been told to kneel, I have been told to worship, I have been told to pray’.

  Stand in the winter streets alone; if you knew no songs, what words would you sing to God?

  Maybe it’s only love against the chaos.

  We keep having conversations out of fear that without them we’d find we’re nothing. But maybe we are nothing.

  Deep in that death, maybe finally we’ll know, we’ll find something alive that can’t be stamped out. A candle in a forgotten chamber, a song someone left at a grave, a rain in an abandoned desert. But if we find ourself there and then cannot find our way back? Then we will live and find out if it is better to be alone than nothing.

  Oh, winter world!

  Come quickly now, be unfurled!

  Lose our hearts in snowy swirls,

  Keep your lovers closely curled,

  Let me find your precious pearls

  Stain my heart,

  in your beautiful mural.

  But perhaps we will find the chamber and there will be nothing in it at all.

  I looked down at my notes but then I realized that if you have to read them they aren’t really your thoughts. To own a thought you need no one to tell it to you, not even your past self.

  Our hearts come to know so much.

  “You lose one thing, and you lose another thing, and eventually it is you that ends up lost.”

  I left my home in a panic to find out what it is that makes people change; I sloughed home wondering if there was anything that could keep them the same.

  What have we done to them? I know I do not care about that sports team, about eating that food, about having that brand. What is essential to me? I did not pick being this gender, having this many limbs, being able to speak this language. What could a man possibly be? People are the only thing left to discover, the only thing that could be New. I am not this man, I did not choose to inhabit this body. What have I done to the people I’ve seen? I wander in silences of regret. I’ve never really believed other people when they use the word ‘I’.  Could we really make this street brand new, these empty dilapidated houses?  It has already been lost to so much pain.

  How old is your oldest smile?

  It is our conceptions of happiness that ruin our lives.

  You were given the winter to stare at the world and squint at what it is but bury it all deep inside, a time and place you will die having been in. When does a man die? When his heart stops beating, his cells stop replicating?  No, when he is in a place where he sees the world and stops in his tracks. He is alone and takes it all in, realizing he did not place himself within it, that he does not know what it is, but that there is a light on somewhere inside him, and it knows what it sees is beautiful. Some pain is worked into the very truths that make us live.

  Would she be the last thing you would see of the world?

  So much is created in each moment we see of the world; much of the time we have to spend working on the earlier moments. We need to not just experience the world, but experience our experience of it. We yearn deeply to see into our own hearts.

  When I see a new friend hug someone else for the first time I suddenly realize ‘Oh! they love people too!’ and they become a human to me all at once. For some reason I don’t realize it until then. ‘People mean things to them too,’ I realize, ‘and they run out of words in trying to show it, just like me’.

  I am ready to be taken up again, for a new death to prove I am still here, for my past sorries to become my present tears. I want to know the special relationships others have with their own words. I want to know I have any thoughts at all. I want to die in this winter world, with all its beauty and truth, and come up with a song of worship on my lips that I never knew before.

  • 2:11 am
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