Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden with Koi

My friend Nathan wrote this gorgeous piece.

 

Near the entrance, a patch of tall grass.
Near the tall grass, long-stemmed plants;

Each bending an ear-shaped cone
To the pond’s surface. If you looked closely,

You could make out silvery Koi
Swishing toward the clouded pond’s edge

Where a boy tugs at his mother’s shirt for a quarter.
To buy fish feed. And watching that boy,

As he knelt down to let the Koi kiss his palms,
I missed what it was to be so dumb

As those Koi. I like to think they’re pure,
That that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty,

After he had nothing else to give, they still kissed
His hands. Because who hasn’t done that—

Loved so intently even after everything
Has gone? Loved something that has washed

Its hands of you? I like to think I’m different now,
That I’m enlightened somehow,

But who am I kidding? I know I’m like those Koi,
Still, with their popping mouths, that would kiss

Those hands again if given the chance. So dumb.

-Nathan McClain, The Collagist

Grace Note

What strange places my feet have taken me to in God’s kingdom.

A Wednesday night, a little less than a year after the breakup with J, when I lost nearly everything my heart desired…

and here I am, sitting on the floor, writing a letter to the boy I am about to break up with.

Loss seems to be the theme of my post-grad years, but also a strength that is learning to endure, that is learning, inch by painful inch, to trust God.

Trusting God doesn’t mean it’s okay.

It just means that you do what you what you have to. You do whatever is placed before your feet to do.

And in this case that means hurting a boy I care for very much. One of the kindest, most generous people I know.

Because he doesn’t love God. And may not ever. And I can’t wait. And I can’t pull him into the richness and depth and grace of the kingdom.

I have such deep affection for you, Damon. I hope you forgive me.

“For my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Musing

Sometimes the old fear comes back.

That he was the one.

And we missed our chance.

 

But then I remember that I do not believe there is one, and one only, for each person. I used to apply this only to death – if my future husband died, that I would be able to find and love another. But I think it applies to the present and the living, too – I think that perhaps there are multiple people out there in the world whom I could marry. I could marry Jason. I could marry Damon. But God has shut the door on the one and the door for the other is only half open.

In the end, perhaps we can only know once we find ourself in the place God has led us to.

But it is a comfort. He was not my one and only. What we had was real – a real, deep connection. And the reality of that, and losing it, makes more sense when you accept that there are multiple amazing people out there, people you can love and who can love you back, but with whom it may not work out. J ended it between us. And most of the time I’m glad that it was his choice – it keeps me from much of the terrible, haunting wonder whether we lost out on what was meant to be, on what was more alive and vivid to  both of us than anything else has ever been.

It was beautiful. But it was only a piece of the story God has written for me, and for Jason. I am trying to live in the peace and freedom of the knowledge of that.

Poetry

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.”

—	Finn Butler