love, read, write

if there is a god (not that there certainly is, but if for a moment we believed it), then maybe god is an elderly woman with kind wrinkles and a knowing smile, a familiar scent of home and nostalgia, a cup of tea between her hands. if there is a god, she is listening, observing, embracing. you’re speaking to her. you vomit out your life in front of her — full of shame, embarrassment, the occasional pride.

you are shrouded by self-pity these days. it’s getting dangerous, the amount of self-absorbed isolation you’re drowning in, indulgently, in the full glory of life’s terribleness. you are slowly isolating yourself from your friends, blindly hurting others through careless words that stem from insecurity. they’re small changes — barely noticeable, but with several months’ time, the world has shifted its tone towards you — it’s defensive, cautious. you’re something they are careful about. you feel a sense of loneliness waft up from the gaps in the flooring.

you’re catching up with an old friend, someone you’ve known through thick and thin. it’s been a year since you’ve last talked — the very year that you’ve descended into this subtle hell of isolation, in which you’ve lost just one millimeter of trust, but one millimeter enough to make you question your friend (but really: yourself). inevitably you reach a point in the conversation when the self-absorbed condescension rises to the surface, and your friend is hurt, and you’re too numb to realize, and so you end the conversation, and the evening sours — again, subtly. you leave with a hug. “it was great to catch up,” you both say, both withholding something just short of a heartbreak. something about that evening makes you start to wonder, is she not a life long friend anymore? what happened?

here’s what happened: you’ve forgotten yourself from within. you’re too curled up in a seductive, purple-blue pity that shines beautifully in the complete darkness of the night. you’ve lost room for yourself, let alone others. those people were waiting, but you’ve made them wait once again.

in the following week, it haunts you — there’s still an inkling of the original you left, whispering into the walls of your stomach that you’ve got to turn it back, that this isn’t how you feel, that you’re lost, you’re lost, please reach out, please say sorry, please apologize, this isn’t you, you must make amends. the voice pierces through every once in a while, just enough to make you realize what you’ve done: you’ve isolated yourself once more, but this time from someone you care, you’ve cared deeply about. someone you shouldn’t lose.

amidst all of this is god. she is watching you — not with eyes (though she has eyes, at least for the sake of personification), but with her entire being. she’s lived her life, too. she’s done similar things. and when she sees you, she sees someone young and lost, someone who holds the guilt and sorrow, but someone who needs to hold that for the time being. she sees someone who does hold the responsibility to make amends, but also someone whose dark thoughts are a part of their particular youth, and that it composes a beautiful life altogether — the one that is completed at your deathbed, the poem written to its last line. only then will the rises and falls make sense. she knows this. she sees this. you needed to hurt and hurt others, she says. it was necessary in the history of your life.