Words I Didn't Know
“I’ll pray for you.”
The words tumbled from my mouth before I could
think about what they meant.
He said: “You pray?”
It was as much of a shock to me as it was
to him.
“Sure,” I said, out loud. Wait.
You do? I
said, in my mind.
He sighed, worry etched into his brow,
which was understandable, given his circumstance. Circumstance that isn’t mine
to talk about, but understandable all the same.
“I don’t know if I could do that,” he said.
“It feels wrong. I can’t go to him now, because I need something. I can’t
introduce myself for a favour.”
Opia:
the ambiguous intensity of looking somebody in the eye, which can feel
simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
I didn’t know it was true
until after, but I meant it as much as I’ve ever meant anything. I’d been
waiting quite some time, I realised, to have the chance to say, uninterrupted
and heartfelt and full of every hurt and pain and hope the years have gifted me
and punished me with and made of me:
Oh boy, don’t over think it. You’re
talking to that guy all the livelong day. You’re Italian! I’ve seen divinity in
the way you prepare squid for your favourite pasta. There’s something bigger
than you in the way you focus when you run. When you go all that way with
nothing but the sound of your own footsteps for miles and miles and miles. That
meditation. That connection with something higher than yourself that says: keep
on. Slow dancing at the wedding, arms around her, eyes closed. That was
holiness. Sanctity. He was there – something was there – when you held her hand
because words couldn’t fill the space of her grief. When you came inside her
and said, “I love you” before you fell asleep. That’s all him. That’s all God.
Rubatosis:
the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
Devotion. Devotion in the grandest
declarations to the smallest, tiniest, daily things. The candle at dinner.
Billie Holiday. How good that cold beer feels, sat out there in the low autumn
light. Sleeping beside him.
Scoring a goal. Getting it right, first
time. Picking yourself back up to try again, and again after that.
Devotion is prayer. Prayer is devotion.
When we finally decide to speak up and say hi, it’s been a long time coming. It
isn’t so much talking to “God” as talking to love itself. Prayer is having a
conversation with you, I think. Conversing
with love. Knowing that you had it in you all along.
So sure, I pray.
Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get
to know someone.
I didn’t “find God”.
That’s not what I’m saying. Though – if I did, that wouldn’t be so bad. If all
we want is to be seen, and to be heard, it wouldn’t be terrible if I chose
God to be seen and heard by. I’m curious, I guess, about what could be bigger
than me. Because. Because I’m doing a pretty good job of getting to grips with my
light and my dark and the bright, burning force inside that says, press on, wee one. Press on. But that
force? The one that sits a hand span above my belly button, almost between my
breasts? It whispers that there is more. That I'm missing the point.
I want to receive
something bigger than my questions, from a source better, higher, purer than me.
I want answers bigger
than my request.
I want to soften, to
love, to surrender, just a little bit more. Stop goddamn worrying so much.
Cease kicking against a self-made tide. Release my resistance.
Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve
always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on
for years.
It happens every time
I come home, to stay at my parents, be it for a weekend or a month. The world
shrinks, and all that matters in goodness. Lovingness. A reminder of what devotion
truly is.
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring
forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you
don’t bring forth will destroy you, says the Gospel of Thomas.
Softness. Softness
will save me.
Crack me open, God.
Give me the courage
to stay that way. Cracked, and okay with it.
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