July 3, 2013

• Midflight

  Sometimes you hit the wall of intimacy. It is nice when you can engage freely with someone and feel your friendship is limitless. But there will come a time when they will ask a question and you will have the right answer in mind, but you know you cannot say it.

  You cannot tell them you did not make their party because you were sprawled on your floor from depression over your relationship with your parents. That night contained a thousand thoughts. What sentence would make them understand all of them at once?

  You drive home angry. You have found the wall of intimacy. Your friendship does not stretch forever.

  You kneel at your bed and pray, ‘God with whom will I be one? Whose eyes will not become gated? When will it never matter which way the conversation goes? When will I feel at home, perfectly at home?’

  Later a person asks you for money, a person asks you for a ride, a person asks you to be a part of their life. You think, whoa! Everybody back up! My life has just me, and you are not allowed in. You flee from the presence of greedy hands, wiping your brow, relieved they are gone. What if I had been eaten alive? We are glad we are one with no one. There will always be a last part of me over which I can say, ‘Mine.’

  I don’t think any of us growing up really believed that life was real in the way we should have known it was. We didn’t really believe our experiences would keep accruing, our memories would keep being built, that everything would keep on going. We were like people sitting quietly, listening to music, our eyes closed and trying to go to sleep, as the plane took off the runway.  Now you open your eyes and think ‘I never knew everything would look so big from up here. Where are we?’

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ you say to a friend, and you vanish behind a door. Behind the door a complicated conversation with someone leaves you for dead and far exceeds your ability to reduplicate. You walk back out the door to your friend thinking, ‘I wasn’t ready for that.’ They say, ‘What happened?’ and you glance at their eyes and say ‘Nothing’ and then you think, ‘One with no one.’

  God, hasten! Our souls are barely breathing, our spirits are numb, our words are drying up! Soon we will stand in rooms and we may not think it, but we will know the rooms are giving us nothing, for they do not give us you. Come stand in our rooms once again with us.  Lord, let us remember our true stance wherever we are is bowed before you.  So many times I pray it is a prayer to myself, crying, ‘Philip help me! You will save me, I know, just as you always have! Come quickly, reinvigorate my soul with myself!’  God, I thought I wished a million things, but I know now it is just to know you. 

  Lord if these souls around me are quickly dying, and you mean to let them die, bury me with them. But if we are meant to be raised, then raise us all together. 

  We are in a room alone. Can no one else come in? Does time erase us every time? People go to graduations and weddings and birthdays to support one another. Who will be there on the day of salvation?   

  When I open my eyes, though, it is just me in my room, and no one is there. They say you do not have a body to see, yet I long so badly to see it. I am body and spirit and I want body and spirit. One with no one. My last prayer always ends up being to some unknown judge of reality, a prayer that you are actually in it.

  Yet I cannot help but think that I am before you.

  • 1:52 pm
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