Devotion(58)

Thea’s hand in mine.

The whale passed. The music faded.


I waited for my heartbeat.

It did not come again.





THE

SECOND

DAY





AFTER





press of time


Somewhere in the press of time I was caught, and now I remain here, like a flower turned to paper, untethered to the soil.

Still, I am here.

There was nothing in my life that ever offered the possibility of what has come to pass. It was wheat or chaff. Dead wood or living fruit. I grew up believing in my father’s holy orchard and its bounty of grace. I believed in hell, mentioned many times by Pastor Flügel. Hell was a bonfire of unfruitful branches. ‘And the smoke of their torment goes up, forever and ever.’

But I am not smoke. And while I have suffered torments, they are not the usual dark stitches cast along needles of pious imagination. They are the same simple hungers of my living self. I hunger to be seen. I hunger to touch and be touched. I hunger for love.

Love. If there is any explanation to my ongoingness, it must be that. Love has pinned me to this world, and so I remain.


The sun is rising again. Fire burning back the night.

Here is another day.





albatross


The last moments of my life are remembered as absences. An absence of pain. An absent heartbeat. Relief. Confusion. A waiting for the continuation of my life and the brief and wondrous second when perhaps I knew, even then, that it was over.

Then a soft and absorbing darkness.

I have spent days trying to fit words around that deepening into nothing. Language is a cramped and narrow thing; it cannot hold phenomena. Things of the spirit reach beyond the farthest boundary of words. But the feeling of that darkness remains with me. As though everything that is to happen had already happened. The dormancy of a seed.

I sense it sometimes, in shifting hours such as this one. Even as sunlight spills over the valley below, as it touches the upper branches of these trees and warms their pale trunks to blush, I feel that darkness glimmer at the corner of my vision. It makes me think that soon I will return to its totality. Or, rather, it will come for me, and I will surrender to it. I will give in and curl into the nothing which holds the possibility of everything.

For now, I am here. Hungry and discontent and not at peace, too full of love. For now, I am here to tell this story to the wind in the hope that it might hold it in trust. Perhaps somewhere, at some time, someone will hear my voice and know that even though I am gone, what I felt remains. What we felt for each other.



There was darkness. And then.

And then. And then. And then there was not.


There was a sudden brilliance. An unbearable light. I was scalded by white-lightness, I was in the heart of a flame. I closed my eyes, yet light still came from above and below. I covered my face with my arm.

I had come from a place of calm cessation. Then light came and gave me form.

I could hear the distant slap of water. Sensed taut shadow of sail. My hands were resting on cloth. Sailcloth. I could feel a raised spine of stitches down its centre.

The light subsided and I opened my eyes and saw blue. Saw the ocean, a perfect mirror.

A shadow passed above. Feathers against the sun.

An angel, I thought.

The wings grew larger and memory stirred in me. The powder and the pain and the whale. And Thea.

Where was Thea?

Wings, feathers burning with light.

The cloth beneath my hands. I noticed a crowd, bent-headed. Was she there? Was she there with me?

The wings drew closer, beating against the sky. Rippling it. Cut the light with feathered knives.

Thea?

There was the whisper of turning pages against the sound of wind.

The light paled then and I saw that the angel was an albatross. Wings spread to the wind, crucified to the sun. Holy host of sky.

My father was singing. I blinked into the hymn and saw that I was upon the open deck of the Kristi, surrounded by a standing solemnity of passengers. Voices rose. Around me, familiar faces, singing.

I opened my mouth, but before words could meet air, I glanced down and saw that my hands were resting on a body, sailcloth sewn to the chin so that people might say a last farewell.

It was my own face.

You are dreaming, I told myself. This is not possible.

Someone had combed my hair with water. I touched it and felt that it was damp.

This is a dream. You will wake up.

But I did not wake up.

The lips upon the pale face were ajar. I placed a fingertip upon them and was frightened to feel them so cold and ungiving when the hand I extended was alive. I ran my fingers across my own mouth and felt that my skin was warm and soft. I did not understand how I could be standing over my own body when I still inhabited it, familiar and living.

Shock kept me still. I was afraid to do more. I noticed the thread hanging from the last stitch in the sailcloth, the needle at its end, glinting in the sun. Waiting for the end of the hymn.

I did not understand why, knowing it all for a dream, I did not wake up.

I am here, I thought. I am still here.

The hymn faded. A sob interrupted the pause and I turned and saw Magdalena Radtke crying, eyes sunken with tears and her arm entwined with my mother’s.

Relief swept through me.