Sunset

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a communion of sorts that I experienced with a past version of myself. This week, I’m indulging in a similar experience, though in a somewhat different manner.

The piece below is a re-working of something I wrote over twenty years ago for a creative writing workshop in college. The original version was a short story that didn’t really work as a complete experience. When our house flooded last Christmas I lost a box that was full of, among other things, some pre-digital writings. This was one of the only things that survived. My goal here was to, in essence, complete it in a way that both honored the original spirit in which it was written but in a format that was perhaps better suited to what that version of me was trying to express. 

The person who wrote this was extricating themselves from a system of faith that had begun to ring hollow to them, and which had left scars that the person who re-visited it is still trying to heal. While I am not returning to that faith, I do find myself at a point lately where I am seeking new means of answering some of the same questions. Part of why I was able to re-visit and finish this now is that, while I may still be seeking, I am doing so from a much healthier place. This is perhaps, then, another moment of reaching in time - taking the hand of that former self and showing him a way forward.

Sunset

The voices of the kneeling faithful
travel down the hall and send
a cold shiver up the back of her spine
As she sits alone in her room. 
She silently ruminates
as the brilliant blue sky bleeds into 
a dull purple-gold outside 
and casts a shadow of the window frame
on the bed covering beside her.

She thinks of him, 
spread out over the form of the shadow
and watches as even now
it begins to recede.

The voices echo between the walls 
like open-ended promises 
ever repeated 
and answered only by themselves
until they finally die out,
fading gradually into 
the cracks in the plaster 
that spread like veins across the wall around her.

The purple fades as the moon rises in the sky
and casts its suppurating yellow glow upon a field
that has long since yielded its final crop 
and lies in fallow wait for 
something else to come in and relieve it
of its place within the chain of life.

He used to seek answers
to questions well beyond his years.
One night he simply asked her
How do we endure?
She wonders herself now.
When there is something floating on the wind
that is strangling the vines
that already squeezed the breath
out of everything that gave us life,
where do we seek nourishment?

She never knew how to answer
and so she closed her eyes, as she’s done now,
and pretended to sleep.

She feels herself drifting into those cracks,
floating through them on the wave of vibrations
like she’s traveling through a system of veins.
She thinks of blood from a disturbed wound 
spreading upon a thick sheet of gauze.
It travels from the center out to the edges. 
She knows that it isn’t really one entity moving
but cells that are being absorbed by adjacent fibers
one by one and given the illusion of travel,
the overall substance getting thinner and thinner
the wider it spreads.

She closes her eyes and tries to follow
the dimming echo of the prayers up to
the point at which they fade away completely 
within the cracks.
How many arguments are in these walls? she wonders.
How many professions of love?
How many confidential confessions that should have died
along with the people who uttered them?
How many prayers?

She suddenly feels very comfortable, 
hidden within these cracks,
and it unsettles her. 
She decides to paint over them some day,
knowing that she never will.

She wore the best dress that she had
and tried to put on a brave face to see him.
She sifted through roses 
cut straight out of bloom
and already dying under the fluorescents.
Drying out as they wait 
to be picked once again.

They told her that he was with God
but she could never picture the two of them together.
She could only ever imagine them independently of each other
Never existing in the same place.

She thinks of him sitting alone
waiting for her
keeping the company of all her other ghosts.

She thinks of Him sitting alone 
waiting for her
keeping the company of all her other ghosts.

She feels no more empathy for Him
than she does for old photographs of herself
Where she is wearing the weight of an emotional burden
that her current self can’t even remember.
She cannot tell if he is angry, or sad, or disappointed. 

Or just lonely.

Maybe that’s the reason to have faith, she considers.
Maybe we are not the ones who need meaning.
Maybe it’s not for our sake after all.

The voices finally die out and she feels a chill.
The shadow of the window frame has faded
in the light of the moon,
which creeps towards its own oblivion 
with the impending turn of a new day.

The birds will no longer sing,
their voices long since choked by ash,
and yet the air hangs heavy with anticipation
nonetheless.

Rolling over and pulling the blanket over herself
she stares into the ceiling and poses his question
to the silence.

How do we endure?

And faintly, from somewhere within and yet without,
comes the response.

We endure.

-cs