An assortment of thoughts from a few months past...

“God please bring the rain
May my Judas become the angel of your dreams
May my tears be your liquid fire
May my crippled heart find your face…
to grasp you…
to hold you…
to fall at your feet
And weep
While my hair washes my affair away
And soils my darkness back into light”

I find myself standing in the middle of a room. There are people all around me. Some of them are laughing, while others walk past with blank faces. Most of them are playing with each other in some way. One girl runs past with her hand holding her yellow hat as her boyfriend peeks around the corner with a mischievous grin. A boy sits with his back to the fireplace, no sparks flying past his face, but a melody playing in his mind and raining through his fingertips down onto his guitar.….
What’s wrong?
My eyes blink and blink again. There is only a deep darkness in the pit of my spirit as I observe those around me. Melancholy? A jolt of lethargia?... I am not too sure. How many months has it been since my darkness has been lifted? Why should I feel it again? Because I don’t remember I wonder if I should slap my face for myself. And then I remember that it is a good thing that I am not hammered to my calendar of loss any longer. It has been a long time, a very long time, since I have cried. In fact, I did not even cry when the walls went up again, nor when they fell down. Nor did I cry days after that, and then more nights after that. I lay awake, wide eyed as a desert. Dry and gritty. Like my heart. God has dared me to dream... to forget about the tempter’s hands and thoughts that covered my spirit in the mask of created deceptions. My supermen have always left me stranded in the phone booth waiting for them all frozen and cold.
… nothing
At church last Sunday there was a message on dating. I was tired of listening to it before I even walked through the door… tired and hungry. Hungry to hear something new, something different. Anything to appease my heart that for so long has sat in the misery of a cry that has no sound but silence. Because there is nothing new, there is nothing old, there is nothing that has not been said or experienced. My attraction to Adam makes me cursed. My love for him makes me blessed. The two go hand in hand but are so obviously distant. But apparently my 'God'says that it is not to be. Unification comes through an “I do” and a pilgrimage of dating for one year and two months with an approximate five month engagement to make sure the two poor beings are able to spend the rest of their lonely lives sharing with one another.
… everything?
I forgave myself on an old auditorium seat six days ago. I forgave myself for always throwing my body to the side of the road while the rain sliced daggers into my face and I threw up in the gutter. That is what I have felt like for too many years, years wasted like a drunk in the gutter waiting for his next wayward foot to fall. I was only able to forgive myself by casting the blame onto the puddle at my feet. The puddle that God loves, the puddle of shit that I have rolled in like a moronic animal at the zoo who is either rolling or pacing his life away. I forgave myself for forgiving. I forgave myself for not believing that I am beautiful. For not believing that I am worth just as much as the woman who can talk on the phone, or has brown eyes, or who has it altogether. In my discovery I am now able to walk away from continually sitting by the television flicking channels with only my own propaganda keeping me company.
… it wasn’t my fault
Was it?
The nights have always been a playground for me. A playground not in the memories many of us share about the childish play of sliding down the red tube slide and being shocked at the bottom, but rather a playground where the games were really being played. The games of boy chases girl or girl chases boy and they put each other in jail. Or perhaps the game where the ground is lava and destroys you, or you fall off the monkey bars because you thought you could walk across the entire row and suddenly you have no front teeth. The game where kids throw rocks at each others heads from across the vast expanse of the pebbled no man's land and put dents into each others skulls that will last a lifetime. These are the moments of the playground that leave me wide-eyed and unable to sleep at three in the morning.
I am a novice in the Olympics, and yet running at it with all I have. I have tried. And I have failed. In failure I have learnt the most about myself, about my sickness and my disfigurement, my sin and the taste that is left in my mouth afterwards. But no matter what, I am still standing here, waiting for God to take me in his arms and love me, while my red hat looks at me through the reflection in the window. I am still standing there while life plays on, I realize that I am not alone.
And so...
The wonderful man has just walked past, and my memory is jolted to what he told me a few days ago, about his broken engagement, said with a sad smile and a shrug of the shoulders. I remind myself of the similarities between all of us, and I turn towards him.…. And I smile. The fireplace is still not sparking, and the boy and girl are still playing... and I too am still standing in the middle of the room. My eyes are teary. My heart is alive.