The God Affair

I don’t remember very clearly first hand. It was a blind date to be sure. February 7, 1980, a Tuesday, exactly 9:15 am. It’s a childhood fling that Mother recalls as a moment of eternal pain. There was a baptismal kind of flood of water—I cried something awful, she reminds me, at the first light of your presence. Indeed, all my senses were aroused and I babbled incomprehensibly, completely oblivious to my foolishness. But you gathered me to your receptive heart, murmured with infinite sound what a Babe I was, and I knew deeply what it was to be wanted. 

Everyone marveled at the arrangement: us living—all together—all of a sudden. Insinuations of indecency aside, they Oooed and Aaaah at our perfection and credited you for the creation of such complete happiness. But just as quickly as you lit my life, you dispersed, and I looked for you everywhere, longing to reclaim that very first magic spark.

To every newcomer, I held our my hands and tried to grasp you back; grasping at zephyrs… So much time elapsed in doubt. Where did you go? How could you give so much joy, and abandon me to kindle some other love yet unborn? Some 9:16 am. It immediately irritated me…and I wailed my discontent, feeling ugly, hungry, naked, soiled, and alone. Who knew I would spend so long trying to regain my faith in you, and in me; because when you disguised yourself behind an endless stream of faces and popped in and out of infinite spaces, I lost confidence in the smallness of my self. I was no longer best—not the belly button of the universe—just another cell among billions of Others. Dime a dozen. And I wasn’t whole, until the second date, that of our first born…

Then, once again water broke, anointing, outstretched little arms receiving the entirety of your love. And the hole in my life I could see was open, but now healed. Though you just as quickly disappeared, I saw you reappearing, winking at me and whispering directives in my ear. Yes, I do tear; you are so removed, yet so near, my celestial paramour.

And I feel you close... I no longer wait. I don’t believe. I know you have already set another date—one for which I can Never be late.