Today I stood in the pouring rain and watched you seduce another woman. The lot lights had come on four hours early, in response to the dark sky, and the gold-white illumination caught torrents like beaded strands of gemstones making molten the liquid storm coursing over her hair, then her jacket, her shirt, then her bare skin.
I knew this was the last time I would be here.
"I'd rather hate you
for everything you are
than ever love you
for something you're not."
I miss riding. But it seems that trashing three bikes in one year is enough of a message from God. When my last Kawi went down and over the edge, tumbling more than a hundred feet to her final rest, I spent long minutes, face to asphalt, rethinking my last forty thousand choices. Sometimes it stuns me that I don't drink or drug. Seems a grrl so sober shouldn't wind up eating the yellow line quite as often as I do. I knew there was a Lesson somewhere between my face and the road.
I also knew this was the last time I would be here.
"I'd rather you hate me
for everything I am
than have you love me
for something I can't be."
She is a beautiful woman and, apparently, impervious to rain and cold. Which is impressive. Speaking of perv, I suppose I shouldn't be standing here, leaning back against your truck, watching you like this. The long, slender, strong lines of your body are becoming more obvious as additional layers of clothing are striped away and the storm soaks you through. The angles of your bodies sliding into place and together into one is artwork, sculpture to me. The eroticism isn't lost but it doesn't hold my gaze. I'm detached from the reality and watch as if your images are splashed on the screen -- where I've certainly seen you both before -- technique and technical merit casting you in perfect light, the sound of the rain artfully concealing each gasp, the wind stealing away the scent of cologne and perfume.
I find myself thinking that the garden like this, the heart of the lot and home to so much quiet memorizing and quiet contemplations both joyful and desperate, is actually the perfect place to make love.
The sky loses all light and there is a rumble of thunder.
"I remembered black skies, the lightning all around me.
I remembered each flash as time began to blur.
Like a startling sign that fate had finally found me.
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve."
There had been a pull-jerk-yank. Some unseen and strong hand. Something, some force, someone, God. To rip me off my bike like a drag line, throw me into the road while my bike laid herself down of her own accord, still at ninety miles an hour, and went parallel to the street for a count of one... two... three... and then through the curve in the guard rail and over edge, dropping instantly out of sight and leaving me with my yellow-line, center line view of sky and ocean meeting as a horizon's horizon.
My atheist friend tells me that it was momentum and centrifugal force that tore me off my bike and threw me onto solid road instead of into cold thin air. I tell him he doesn't know squat about physics.
It is two months and several million revelations about life, about truth, about being tested, later that I finally look away from you and your long-time lover. I am sure she knows everything about you and loves you just as you are without judgment or pause. I am sure she has several billion scathing words for me that she is too elegant to share but that are expressed with startling eloquence every time she looks at me and smiles.
We're all damaged and casting the first stone just makes it bounce around in my head. I find myself staring at the asphalt of the parking lot when the storm shifts and I hear your voices tossed together, cried promises both wild and tender at once.
I sink down to the curb, my palms to the cold road once again.
This soldier travels.
Wrists bound in the yellow center line.
The song of storm raging at her back.
This soldier travels.
Pan pipes play from steel forests
all neon and chrome.
The soldier travels
armed with scripture
armed with mistakes
armed with the reality
that she is always
only
forever
a practicing Christian.
I am still sitting there when you drive away. I am still sitting there when the storm surrenders to clear, starry night. I am still sitting there when I look up and find her watching me. Her eyes speak volumes that all begin with disappointment. But then I blink my eyes, I shiver, and she is gone.
A friend wrote to me with her heart in a panic. She said, "I have spoken thoughtlessly and destroyed someone's chance to come closer to Christ." She knows and I know that it isn't true but the regret and sorrow she feels in the pit of her stomach, welling in her chest, is very, very real. I assure her, "No mortal hand can keep a soul away from Christ." They have certainly tried over the ages, and none of them have succeeded. Only we can distance ourselves from God. And even then He fights for our return. My friend writes, "I'm going to make this right. It eats at me. I *want* to make it right. I must." And I pray for her and I tell her, "Do it. No hubris. Be brave. Do it." And she does.
And less than a week later I find myself in the same situation. But still I click Publish Post.
Like a petulant child who will not learn from the mistakes of her parents, sometimes one soldier will throw herself into the mine field in the heat of battle, in her furor to reach and purge the enemy, even as she sees her fellows scattered around her.
Only to find that the enemy, when faced, is not roaring, but weeping.
"So give me reason to prove me wrong, to wash this memory clean.
Let the floods cross the distance in your eyes.
Give me reason to fill this hole, connect the space between.
Let it be enough to reach the truth that lies across this new divide."
Because from the depths of my heart, I'm sorry.
EJ
