καιρός

There are moments between words, places we can only just barely describe. They dance with us on hot summer nights, but never tell us their names, leaving us forever thirsty.

These times between time are always accompanied by light and awe. I can tell you the brightness of the experience and I can describe the feelings which bubble up in me, snaking up from within like sprouts from a tulip bulb. But these descriptions are charcoal sketches of bright oily paintings which would inspire Van Gogh.

The doorway frames her, and light is shooting from her hips, her hands, her hair. She is a flame, frost white, so brilliant I must fight back tears in order to keep my eyes on her. She is smiling and somehow even her lips have light blooming from them. In this rare moment, a space which is before our marriage and beyond our engagement, I find myself in simple joy of her and all she is. My love is the shape of a starfish, a willow, a crinkled note.

I am holding a piece of romaine lettuce, patting is veins dry as I have done with one hundred and three pieces before it. I am praying the Jesus prayer and I do not remember how I began. Perhaps I have always been praying it, somewhere down and beneath my rib cage. It does not matter that I do not believe in God, does not matter that I do not wish to pray. There is only the wet lettuce and a cycle of orange and glowing words which pulse like coals on my lips.

The sound of worship music is hot lead in my stomach, a drill which winds its way into the bedrock of my body. There is only fire, an anger and sorrow which sears back the callouses of reason and facts and evidence, leaving ashy bitterness and scorched love to smolder and cool. I was not made new by good news, did not feel rebirth after my death, only the algid grip of Sheol. No third-day resurrection, and no life-giving breath.

I wake in bed next to her. I am in warm and vast darkness. I have been holding her hand as we slept. I do not know the meaning of this, but I am grateful for the love which does not wait for morning light. I smile, squeeze her hand, and fall back asleep.