This evening, a week of reworking my room came to its conclusion and I stretched back on the bed and contemplated the blue-green, peacock-teal walls (two colors), lit with cotton ball bulbs and multi-colored Christmas lights, wound around each other.
The twining, the twosome.
So often they go together.
Two weddings today, of good friends, one of which I went to.
“It is not good for man to be alone,” said my pastor, but also,
“Marriage is not enough to keep a soul afloat”
and somewhere between – and in both – the truth lies.
But I miss a companion.
so much moving, so much travel and change Lord, so few places and spaces I’ve ever called my own. Isn’t it enough – nearly enough? I am so much better than I ever thought I would be at surviving, Lord, at keeping going, at enduring alone – but I never wanted this skillset.
Stretching out in the blue and the wake of light, a rush of ease and power of my own, my room, my clothes, I have done this – and I know it is good in your sight.
But this beautiful thing, Lord, this fragile, delicate, one-night beauty – who will share it with me? Who will see it, also, and in the seeing make the beauty complete? For I believe the following to be at least partly true –
“One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.”
Had Damon, or someone, been there, to sprawl beside me, in all their ease and the long length of their body next to mine and the smile at this tiny beautiful thing I’d done – my heart would have, for just that one shattering moment, that near-perfect joy and peace that comes from the blend of external beauty and internal companionship. In the same way that your Truth is both law (an externality) and love (an internality), so everything, in its very fullest form, is both at once. The two – an internal and an external reality. This is why heaven, when it comes, will not be just a spiritual plane, but the world itself will be remade. Completion. Twoness. Wholeness.
I want someone to sprawl beside me, Lord. The slow smile and the laughter. And it’s so close and so possible – had I not walked away from Damon it would be him, there beside me, him even now who is four streets away, and also a universe gone. I don’t regret.
But I wish for an ease of heart.
Coffee Girl 