fly away

When all the words fly away, not from lips to ears, but from eyes to hands –

This week began with an awakening before dawn, four-something, bleary dark muffling the room. Something Was Wrong, but I dismissed that twitch as a dream-thread caught in the corner of my mouth.

Walking took me to bus took me to work took me to the news that someone was killing other someones on the other side of the country. I was confused; am confused; have no understanding still. Sad, scared.

My heart sank as forty-five minutes passed me on the street in a neighborhood I want to call home. No one was showing up. Was anyone showing up? I drank a glass of wine and talked to a gentleman who insisted that God doesn’t let anyone down. I didn’t argue but I wanted to: God wants people to be gunned down for no reason? I didn’t say it.

Disappointed in the dank, peeling studio at the end of the too-long wait, I made my way home, and put Monday to bed without a proper goodnight. I don’t pray and couldn’t cry.

With a rush, unthinking and blinking in bright light, Tuesday brought a solid shard of hope: someplace, a place, I made sense in, a station for my things and for my time. My heart leapt for it. But I lost all that hope in fear that I was disappointing someone close to me by even considering it.

And fear rolls in worse than the occlusion of fog or the stench of rot, and fear takes us back the beginning, undone to the point of pointlessness, and fear singes our nerves and every breath is a fresh hug of terror. For days, I gripped fear like a shield and I hid and I bashed anything that came close and I slept underneath it and I called out my favorite names from nightmares.

Push through. Push hand through blackness. I am saying to you, I don’t let you down. You don’t let me down. What God does is His business, but I’m going to reach and you’re going to hold and we’re going to fix it.

I step off a bus. I walk across a street. I give someone a small piece of paper with lots of numbers on it, and she gives me a large piece of paper with lots of words on it, and suddenly there it is: the next moment, tickling like a moth in cupped hands. Here, want to see?

Let’s watch it fly away together.