God or Chance or a Miracle or Something

I made a plea with God only once. I have wanted things and asked for things many times before (perhaps even begged) but when the time came to plea, I have only done it once.

I don’t remember her car coming towards me. I remember the impact, I think, the burst of white smoky haze, the ringing that started in my ears and sizzled throughout my entire body. I remember crying out through the stale, after-chaos air.

Please dear God, please dear God, please.

I didn’t know what I was pleading for then, I thought maybe my life. As soon as I untucked myself from the drooping airbag lined across my door and slid my shaking body into the street though, I knew.

I hate myself, I want to die, I’m so sorry.

I’m certain I walked out into the street without looking. I sat myself down, rocked like a child in timeout.

I hate myself, I want to die, I’m so sorry.

People came. They gave me water, hugs, words of encouragement. Some gave advice, though I didn’t trust them. I stayed busy rocking and making my plea.

I hate myself, I want to die, I’m so sorry.

My plea isn’t the topic of this story, though.

The topic of this story isn’t that I had been saved by God or Chance or a Miracle or Something and that after being saved, I pleaded to die.

The topic of this story is what I discovered about the one thing that envelops everything that is and was and ever will be — a glimpse of the infinite. This story is about the events that lead up to that discovery — that showed where I’d forgotten to put it — and the person that came to remind me.

And so the topic of this story is love.

We say I love you to the people we love, and when we mean it, we swallow it with actions. We say I love you and bring advil and tonic water and forehead kisses after they get in a wreck. We say we’re sorry that something terrible happened and we cup tear-streaked cheeks in our hands. We give them five minutes to be cruel to themselves then hold fierce onto their shoulders and say, ‘your time to be cruel is up’.

We roll windows down on drives home and we shout with them at the top of our lungs: It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.

We say “thank God I told you I loved you for the first time yesterday.”

And when they sit cross-legged in the middle of the night, we feel them sitting and we sit with them while they cry. And when they wake up and do the same thing an hour later, we sit with them while they cry again.

It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, we say.

We say it over and over, we get them to repeat it.

It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

And when they still can’t sleep we ask: “what would you do if it were me?”

And they curl onto our chest, comb tender fingers through our hair. They cup our chin with their trembling hands. They soften their bloodshot eyes, they smile and they say:

It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.

And then finally — as if by some Miracle — they fall back to sleep for the night.

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