You

This is something I wrote a few weeks ago. Enjoy.
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I remember the day You came to me and said You would walk alongside me. I couldn’t tell if the feeling was fact or fiction, fabricated, hallucinated, or the truest thing I’d felt in my life. Whatever its authenticity it swept me up without a backward glance. So many others had felt the same thing, I knew I must have embraced the fortune to stumble upon what we privileged few called the unfounded and undeniable omniscient presence. I floated my life along this serene and unruffled current, the reassurance of surety, of stability, acting as my buoy and teaching me to trust. Such simplicity, such blessed ignorance that proved to fortify the walls of protection the world, perhaps You, had built around me. Never allowing myself to doubt, I reveled in the splendor of a somehow superior recognition of spirit, a spirit I of course manufactured. Or maybe the world before me can be blamed, but I let it take its hollow form in my life. Thinking that this thing I called Your presence, Your accompaniment was all I ever needed. Never mind the nagging suspicion that it was somehow counterfeit, that I was merely a pawn in this giant game of chess You commandeered with Your grandiose hands.

Well somehow I then told myself I succeeded in knocking over this board on which You had previously controlled my life. I remember this day as well. Of course I am probably fooling myself to think I exerted such strength, really a fool to think anything definitively. But from that moment until now I have proudly borne the scepter and crown of unhindered and exceptional tolerance, which must somehow be better because of its inclusivity. Because it is welcoming rather than condemning and because it allows me to choose from the barrel of ideas what I like and what suits me best. And so I have clothed myself in everything, Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat, or something of the like. And it feels good, better even, though perhaps You may hate me for thinking so. Its utopia bubbles within me largely because I myself have defined its existence, molded its shape with my own weathered hands, which makes it mine and allows me to secretly claim a pinch of Your omnipotence, all-powerful supremacy in my very grasp.

The problem then has become that all-powerful supremacy is quite lonely it seems. Back when You walked with me, carried me even, the simplistic paper-thin appearance of comfort was better than the weight of carrying the world on my shoulders and walking alone. Each step heavier than the last and reminding me why it was simpler to grant You sovereignty. At least with You wearing the crown I could fondly caress the memory of running through meadows with the grace and freedom of a childhood never aging, never gaining the days that come with what we seem to think is wisdom. Without the responsibility of perpetual guilt one needn’t worry about how hard the soles of one’s feet will land upon the once-trodden earth. One need only worry about the language of glorious entrapment, of celebrated slavery to something professed to be greater than oneself. The language that becomes natural to us, the motor that propels us forward in existence, not a second thought given.

Only I’m not ready to speak the language once again. The words exit as sharp as a dagger heading towards my barely-healed heart once scarred by the memories of each word’s separate jab. So if You don’t mind, I’ll continue to look for that feeling of completion, of accompaniment elsewhere, until all the aids at my disposal show themselves barren and I am left wandering in the desert. In Your mind I am sure that is the inevitable end, though I’m not yet convinced. I’ll have to trudge through on my own, unguided and stubborn. And if indeed the board remains intact and Your hands braced for their next move, I’ll have no say in the matter and things will end up perhaps as they should. But grant me only the eternity of believing that I made it so, that I made the pond ripple with presumptuous excellence that I’ll claim we all secretly long for. And if this cannot be granted, leave me with the humble understanding that while the trust I was taught in the beginning isn’t as simple as it seemed, it is not always fruitful to trust merely in oneself. At some point we must admit how little we know and how truly out of reach the answers really lie. Though my fingertips will continue to stretch and stretch up into the sky…