“Think you can't pray in VR? Try again. Christ in everything – in rain, in wind, in kisses and sighs, in harp music and children's gazes – means in pixels too. Catch up, baby. It's the post-modern, post-high tech revolution. Forget milk. Got quad processors?”
It was the summer I was eighteen but let's say I was twenty-two because that's better for my demographic. I had completed my first year in a fine institute of higher learning and had traded Boston night clubs for NYC's (as well as the fake ID that got me in – never to drink but always to dance and often to woo a handsome raver home for a little acrylic... or henna tat... practice) with an amused shrug, my first bike, and a murmur of, “Yeah, I'm game.”
Yeah. Sure was. The zero-sum playa.
Much to my parents' chagrin, my grandmother – ex-military, so not American, short-haired, and globe-trotting – requested/required/demanded I accompany her for the summer instead of going home. It would become the only summer I didn't take courses and the last summer I would ever have with her. But I didn't know that then and neither did she. She was ripped and dashing, carded at sixty-two (perhaps a pick up line used by our waiter? perhaps not), a no nonsense, no bluster kind of woman who rarely raised her voice unless she had already won the argument. She would survive front lines, a dangerous penchant for photographing militarized zones, and an uncanny sense of where trouble was going to happen, only to prove mortality a force with a red light that a London stranger claimed he “never saw” at 80 miles an hour.
Special circle, Keith. Christ forgives. The granddaughter? Not so much.
We seemed to go everywhere those ten weeks. It wasn't my first time aboard with her but my first time with just the two of us. I saw a side of her that was lyrical and joyous. Flirtatious and glowing. The sharp, wily, brilliant woman I had known all my life – who seemed to go out of her way to clash with my sharp, opinionated, brilliant mother – took a back seat to the woman who wanted to show me the midnight side of dancing in Spain with a man twice my age, and reading books of scripture on crackling parchment while she murmured in whispers with monks who called her still by her military rank. I was entranced with the world. With a world I had never seen before even as we revisited by favorite locales.
Grandma had always been the holder of my passport. My proud parents struggled with bills and property tax. They refused help. So Grandma would let herself in and make sirloin and brussel sprouts, and red potatoes with dill and garlic. They couldn't argue when dinner was already on the table. Car broke down? Simple replacement appeared. She co-signed on my first loan for a bike... and helped pull strings and pull together patrons for scholarships and loans for school. Canvas? Brushes? I worked for those. I paid her in originals... many of which she resold to galleries and fine hotels just so she could take me to lunch and there it would be on the wall. “Fancy that, my angel,” she would say, and raise one sculpted eyebrow in mock surprise while she sipped her dark espresso and thrummed her short nails on the mahogany table.
“This is unreal, Grandma!” I laughed one night, the streets full of dancing and masks and the scent of perfume and heat and spices.
She straightened the clasp that held my hair then decided against it and took it out, throwing it to a passing boy wrapped in green silk and stain leafs, his body almost bare. He called something to her but my French wouldn't be good enough for four more years to understand him or her husky response.
“What is real, my angel?” she asked me, so seriously. “What is unreal? If you feel it,” and she tapped my heart, the ribbons across my chest almost all undone from dancing. “Then it is real.” Ten years before I first found VR.
And then someone, small, wiry, with flashing eyes, a sly smile, and small hands, caught her wrist and danced away with her, laughing into the crowd. Leaving me to think, for a moment, that she was a celestial body, surrounded by a swirl of white and gold silk and lace and taffeta.
You wrote to me tonight, my friend, “Make my faith stronger.”
I wrote to you yesterday, “I am no one. I am best invisible.”
When I was four I was terrified of death. It would be better for my demographic to say when I was fourteen but I was four. So there. I would have these panic attacks... they came out of no where and nothing. Daytime, night time, lunchtime at school. I'd see shadows on sunny days and was certain they were death, tangible and hungry.
One night I panicked and locked my bedroom door and crawled under my bed and screamed. And screamed. And kept screaming. And the doctor on the phone said, “Let her scream herself to sleep.” But after an hour my parents called my Grandma instead.
The door knob opened in her hands. Of course. She closed it behind her with a click. She walked across the wood floor and I remember the feeling of her boots. Then she reached under the bed with one strong hand and my little bunny pj top bunched in her fist and she slide me out in one smooth motion like someone might drag a cat out from under the couch. She gathered me in her arms, there on the floor, me still screaming no word nonsense in unexplainable fear.
She had been speaking, the same prayer, over and over and over again, for quite some time by the recitation that I heard... but I did finally hear her:
“Imagine stepping on shore
and finding it Heaven...
Taking hold of a hand
and finding it God's hand.
Imagine breathing new air
and finding it celestial air...
Feeling invigorated
and finding it immortality.
Imagine passing from tempest and pain
into unbroken calm...
Waking up
and finding yourself home.”
Shadows became shadows. Panic didn't occur. Not in daytime or night time or even in the lunch line. I was never afraid again. (Not even at 100 mph along the California shore.)
I told Grandma years later, “You made my faith stronger.”
She said with a smile, “I am no one. I did nothing.”
We ended the summer, our summer together, on shores draped in fog and emerald earth, on silver-green seas so cold it took my breath from my lungs but still I came and swam. That sea turned this brown grrl blue so many times I think tears froze on my cheeks and fell among the round pebbles that made the shore.
And one morning there you stood. I had seen you once before, I think, when we hiked an hour for fresh meat and eggs. I think Grandma knew your name and you spoke English with an accent that I could have listened to for hours... okay, weeks. You invited us to service on Sunday, talking to her while you looked at me, while I looked at a deep barrel of pickled something (beets? potatoes?) that I seemed to have dropped my bravado in.
One morning there you stood. “You swim?” you asked. I was certain you weren't real. We were leaving in two days. No one had been here for fourteen. I was starting to believe that the universe was me, Grandma, and Christ. I walked past you without speaking because you were obviously a hallucination.
“Did you see any selkie, E.J.?” But you didn't say E.J., which everyone calls me, you said my birth name which no one does.
I turn around and look at you. Really look for the first time. I realize that I had mistaken your gender in town. I realize that you are breath-taking. I realize I never want to leave Ireland. “Did any selkie see me?”
Duh. Wow. My way with words came late, didn't it, babygrrl?
I am 98% frozen to death by this point. And let's not talk about what I'm (not) wearing. You gave me your coat. It was brown. It was soft leather. It was not made of seal skin. We walked back to the house. Grandma had two hot cups of coffee and two hot plates of breakfast sitting on the table for us. She took her Bible, hand-written, and left us.
Across the table from each other I realized that your eyes were two different colors.
You whispered to me, “Make my faith stronger.”
I shook my head, “I'm no one. I'm just her granddaughter.”
And it wasn't until ten more years that I realized:
The paths of our lives are lined with trees of no ones, are laid with cobblestones of no ones. Our personal revelations, that unfold (or fold?) like origami boxes, other dimensions with each step we choose to take along our impassioned way, are lit internal and eternal with no ones. There are no “I am someone!” along the impassioned path. There are no “I am the one!” that truly help you. Because, He said to us, quietly, with His deep brown eyes and deep brown skin, “I am the one. I am the only one. And I am with you. Always.”
So everyone else is no one.
And I feel so blessed to be of them.
With all my love, on this sweet Sabbath,
E.J.
