It doesn’t matter anyway because people have a way with dreaming and believing and inventing words like forever that seem to liberate us from a brief existence that begins to count down the moment we’re born and only stops short at the first kiss of the same short lived romance. It doesn’t matter because we could always romanticize. Even the most concrete science of matter and antimatter annihilating each other at the first minutes of the universe to a battle between good and evil. Or your past life that could actually exist withyou simultaneously were you once an evening star at that corner of the sky. Tonight as you look up and look back in time. Or when you look for something that lasts. Like timeless myths you’ll always hear like a voice in the sweetest tune crystallized in your memory. Or poems that transcend all the world’s time. All that’s left to remind you of the more basic themes of the same ageold romance. And yet the same verses of much the same lives. I thought that this would be a lifelong promise-to always write something beautiful. Always in the end something beautiful. But there is a kind of story no one in the world should ever write about that it would be better if there had not been any story at all. Then at least the world would be spared of the saddest ending ever told. Like a kind of hurt that no one on Earth should ever be allowed to feel. A kind of hurt I feel that seems to stay the way a rainy evening that broke into a stormy night lasts longer than it should. The way tales would sometimes be helplessly engulfed in a dense turbulent vapor of every other unwilling fleeting tales pleading to be remembered and immortalized. Like half written stories, I search for redemption, grudgingly coming up with the same wrong spaces between old lines and phrases. With only the unnecessary heavy baggage of the deepest yearning for something truer, purer. Only too wide awake trying to fill a nameless void by reading far more hopeful promises into nothing more than what is plainly and justly written. Struggling with a needless insecurity attack. Of things that are meant to liberate you could actually be the things that would cage you in. Fighting an all too proud and jaded stubborn assertion in a mind that prompts me to believe that what I sought long after is only a concept. Just a concept, more like some cliché everybody else required out of mandatory existence: a savior every other soul all asks of his most transient stay, a redeemer every other soul is intensely aching for. Like a long aimless prose, I long for a little more faith. For a little more conviction. For a little more resolution. Not for the same circumstantial randomness. Because the skies hold their mysteries but they don’t play the game of chance. As I look for an answer. For a drug, a therapy, a prayer. A ticket for a one-way two-thirty a.m. trip out of a self-imposed soliloquy. Because redemption seems a little too far off, refusing to give itself away like some satirical cosmic fireworks with a simple roll of a mechanical dice. Like an all too sickening sinusoidal wave of juvenile laughter and anxiety. Like the way the dance of quantum fluctuations make weather and conspire with vengeful jealous storms, building them in a kind of rage I could sometimes feel coming from me as suddenly as it dies out one early morning in July. One early morning in July. Only to wake up in the daybreak suddenly, purposely with a God that laughs, a God that smiles, a God whose eyes gently speak. A God that has put me in places to meet different faces as I lived through emotions of love and hate and hurt and joy until I began to acknowledge that he was always and as always been behind all the stories of my life and of every other’ s life story as well. A God that would carry me back home when I wander off the track even by two paces apart and would never tire of doing this again and again and again until I ultimately learn. A God that I could always try to run away from only to stop when I find out that all roads lead back to him after all. A God so real, asking me to heed his call if I’d only recognize, if I’d only admit the need, if I’d only accept, if I’d only allow my heart to be little bit more yielding so I could let myself believe once more In a God that actually sits down next to me only to talk, to listen, to understand. A God that would offer me his shoulder as I turn to look for him when all the world dissolves. A God that identifies with human pain and knows exactly what human weakness meant when I find myself standing before him as I bow my head meekly, too weary and defeated. As I struggle with vanishing defenses. As I strain from the first tear that threatens to fall and trickle down. As I surrender my hand to a God that would ask me what’s wrong and would later tell me why it’s wrong. A God that doesn’t necessarily halt the world when I wanted it to cease but provides me with the warmest refuge when I’m too tired to carry on. A God that doesn’t automatically grant me all the answers to all of my questions but calms my agitated soul and gives my mind peace. A God that would exactly point out to me what moving mountains actually are only to show the world clearer, almost for the first time. A God like one early morning in July like one summer solstice in a provincial home where I could taste the first light of day in a humble breakfast. A God that broke the spell of last night’s most turbulent thunderstorm. Because I asked-honestly, deliberately, painfully-only to realize, to shed a little bit extra pride and layers, to be a little bit more willing to be directed, to give away some things even if they were thought to be the best things in life, to be a little bit more humane to say a modest prayer To a God that doesn’t only summon the four forces of nature to stop, to persist, to freeze but to a God with a face so kind and near unlike the impersonal primal cause of all there is. A God that couldn’t only run the whole universe backward in time but a God I’d never expect to be working in the most silent and anonymous life, to be seen and heard in the gentlest of tones, to be deeply ingrained in circumstances of synchronicities, to be involved in the simplest most humble drop of morning dew on a leaf. And a God that was born only to die on the cross for me. . . . . It doesn’t matter how many hours since it began to rain last night. Seconds don’t matter when you think about forever. Not even minutes. Not even years. While the night could be so quiet without the sound of water rushing out of the sky. The way life could be so short without the word forever. It wouldn’t be as striking as the constellations we’d greet as easily as we’d leave them behind continuing, living, outlasting, withholding. It wouldn’t be as beautiful and purposeful without a redeemer in life. I had just become a Christian. Lord, I must have set foot in the most unchartered land because each encounter and every life is filled with so much meaning, so much purpose, so much beauty beyond phrases and figures known. That I could write a thousand poems, a thousand lines, a thousand songs until I run out of words and all the world dissolves but still nothing comes close. And nothing would ever come close to your name or to everything you are and to everything else that you mean and would still mean to me. That I would leave a plea by the heaven’s doorstep only so I could lift up my life, offer all I am and all that I have and then again more if there’s anything more, if there’s anything else I could give to you if you’d only take my hand again. Because this is everything I would have myself live for. And all I would pray to ask for in all of my lifetime is only to let you have me walk by your side.
