Genesis · Chapter One
Before I recognized the light
I used to think of the reckoning as one night: June 7, 2020. The night a part of me died. The night I cried out, “I want to live!” The night I experienced a love and peace I hadn’t known how to name.
But that’s not when God began showing up in my life. Those everyday moments had been happening all along. I simply hadn’t recognized them. That is a different kind of beginning: not the arrival of love, but the opening of my eyes to it.
And a reckoning isn’t necessarily a single moment. It can be a season. It can come in darkness, or in daylight with a sink full of dishes. Sometimes it means setting out; sometimes it means learning to stay. I keep discovering that two things I once thought incompatible can both be true.
That evening, I could be genuinely connected to someone I loved and profoundly disconnected from myself. The happiness was real. So was the disconnection. I don’t have to erase one to tell the truth about the other.
This is the story of one night. It is not the whole story.
June 7, 2020
June 7th, 2020. It is a good day. A great day, actually, even though the reason we are visiting my boyfriend Kyle’s parents is due to the death of their beloved pet. After a lengthy, love-filled visit, Kyle’s father not only recommends a movie but offers to let us borrow the VHS tape from 1981. Kyle puts his hand up and jokingly refuses such a thing before we head out and make our way home through the Oregon rain.
We are enjoying each other’s company throughout the evening. We laugh and play and talk. We are fine. We are better than fine. It’s nice to feel connected as things have been up or down, hot or cold lately. Just a year before I had packed up most of my belongings feeling this urge to leave. I broke Kyle’s heart. I was sad and felt helpless and wasn’t sure what was wrong. Marshmallow’s song “Happier” was my theme song during this time. I looked for and found a one bedroom basement apartment and even signed a lease that I broke before moving in. I couldn’t explain it. It’s like I was locked in like a train on the tracks with no choice but to glide along the rails. When I returned after dropping the keys in the owners mailbox, Kyle welcomed me back home with open arms. So, yes. It’s nice to feel connected.
And I did. I felt connected to Kyle that evening. Yet somehow I was still disconnected from myself.
To our surprise, we find the movie Kyle’s father recommended on Amazon Prime and begin to watch it. Our attention bounces back and forth as we are caught up in the events of the day.
Finally, Kyle and I quiet down and begin to focus on the movie. Just minutes in, without so much as a warning, my chest heaves violently forcing the breath out from my unsuspecting lungs. An inhale refuses to come. Impending doom. Imminent death. Time moves in slow motion. I see myself grab my phone off of the table as I concentrate on dialing 911. I know that I am dying. “What the hell are you doing?”, Kyle asks. I simply can not respond.
As the movie plays in the background, a story unfolds quite quickly in my head. Glimpses, flashbacks, memories not remembered, unfathomable storylines, best-selling plots, the things nightmares are made of. Is this my life? Am I seeing my past? What, I wonder, is happening? So often, for as long as I can remember, I’ve confused movies with my life. Or rather I’d have a memory of my life and confuse it for a movie. These memories take my breath away. I have been taken captive. I know that I am dying. And I see that I have been dying for a while now.
“911. What is your emergency?” I say that I can’t breathe and that I need some help. These are the only words that I can get out even though I am desperate for help.
“Are you safe? Are there any weapons?”, the operator goes on. I physically can not respond. The words will not come. I am in a trance. I think to myself that no, I don’t feel safe. I feel absolutely unsafe. The weight of these memories are crushing me. Can’t you see? Don’t you know? Can you tell? And yes, I am pretty sure there are weapons. Just the thought of them frightens me. I have a choice to make but it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. If I speak, I am just sure that I will die quicker. So I remain silent though I silently need help. That’s the story of my life.
I believe that the 911 operator is in on it. Whatever “it” is. She is a part of this fear that is growing inside of me. I am resolute to not say anything at all and so I don’t. I can’t tell the operator that I am dying. That someone I love is trying to kill me. I can’t tell the operator that my body has surely been poisoned. Memories of aspirin being crushed between two spoons when I was little sweep through my mind. I can’t tell the operator that my insides are coming out due to the poison. I can’t say how excrement is surely fizzing down my leg. A slow ooze. I can’t tell her of the atrocities that I see in my head, all in the name of love. I keep the phone in my right hand, a faux sense of security, as I walk silently out the front door in search of safety.
“Talk to them”, Kyle pleads. He is absolutely confused. But he doesn’t know that I am scared of him, too. He watches in disbelief from the doorway as I slowly walk out the door and down the empty street wearing a hoodie, baggy sweatpants, and fuzzy socks. Ill prepared for the stormy journey ahead.
I head east toward the main road that is sure to have some lights, some traffic and some people who aren’t in on it. So I walk through the day’s mud puddles and through the thick darkness while noticing that all of the porch lights are off. All of the streetlights are off. No light emanating from anywhere. There is no one to be found. I find this disheartening and strange.
I start to think that this is the Truman Show. I am surely on a movie set and all of the neighbors are in on it. I begin to see a faint light coming from the inside of one home. Hope! Through the large picture window I can see a television on and I know that I am on the screen but I don’t know where the camera is. Two small bodies are standing in the living room watching the static on the television. Knowing that I do not want to frighten the children, I keep walking desperate to find someone to help me. I am alone.
I walk for what seemed like an eternity all the while unable to breathe. Helpless. Abandoned. Neglected. Betrayed. Violated. Left to die. I think about laying down in the welcoming mud under a tree and entering into an inevitable endless sleep. I feel that I will not survive through the night but I keep walking with arms outstretched, offering myself to a God I had never known. To the universe that surrounded me. To a higher power that I couldn’t fathom. To anyone and to anything that could end the ache growing inside of me. All the while my chest caves under the weight of it all. My breath is nowhere to be found.
Seven minutes pass when <insert angelic sound here>. I see the light. I think it is a street light but it is so much more. It is audible. A bright flash. A thunderous boom. I shout the words “I want to live!” Or perhaps that’s just in my head. I stop walking. The spell broken. The jury swayed. A wish granted. A prayer answered. A life begun. A breath binges into my hungry lungs as I gasp to drink in the cool air. I turn around and start walking back to our house with a renewed sense of self, of purpose, of clarity, of connectedness, of wanting to fucking live.
Two of the county’s finest arrive on the scene. The sheriff cars roll up, window down, and ask if I am the one who called 911. “Yes! I did!” I exclaim with more than necessary excitement as I lean over with my hands on my knees still trying to catch my fly ball breath. They step out and ask me to get inside of the patrol car. I politely decline stating that I may have shit my pants…adding that this was not my finest moment. This… the cops enjoy. They tell me to lean on the vehicle and asked if I require medical assistance. I, again, politely decline, and still, am trying to catch my breath. I say no, no medical attention but thank you… I can finally breathe again. I can breathe! As though for the first time.
My phone rings. I begin to reach for it in my sweatshirts front pocket when I am told to keep my hands where they could see them. I quickly put my hands up unsure of what to do. I learned that from the movies. An officer grabs my phone from my pocket and walks away with it as he greets Kyle on other end of the line with a “we have your girlfriend and she shit her pants.” He laughs with more enjoyment than necessary. I wonder to myself if that was legal; taking my phone and answering it but I’m afraid to use my voice so I stay quiet. That’s also what they say to do in the movies.
The officers instantly decide that I am cross-faded. I tell them that I don’t know what that means. They say that I am surely drunk and high. I tell them that two White Claws and a bong rip doesn’t normally have that effect on me. They say that they would normally offer a ride home but that I was on my own because… I shit my pants. Again with the sadistic laughter. These protectors, these public servants only mock me. Scourging my dignity. Forcing me up and out of our shared connection with humanity. And I want to get away from them. These police, they leave. Thank goodness.
I begin walking at a normal pace the remainder of the way home. A small smile forms across my face as the penal code dust settles. I start to skip like a schoolgirl. I can’t remember the last time I skipped. Feeling revived, I start to half-ass run. The last time I ran I was at full-throttle, thinking I was a younger version of myself, when I got wobbly and had to slow down before I fell over. This time as I run, I not only pick up speed, I maneuver with great agility. I am Jackie Joyner-Kersee. By the time I get to our front yard I am absolutely giddy. Fucking. Giddy. A zest for life. I run in, shout hello to Kyle, and head straight to the bathroom. I pull off my muddy socks, start the shower, drop my pants and yell, “ FOR THE RECORD… I DIDN’T SHIT MY PANTS!!!” And then I ramble on about having sex as a child.
Another reckoning
Today, years later, I am living another beginning. For four years, home was a van. I knew what I had, where it went, and what I needed to do. I had one fork. And it was always clean enough. Now I live inside four walls, with bills and dishes and belongings that need places to go. It is a gift. It is also an adjustment. I can be grateful and challenged at the same time.
I used to picture growth as a line: leave the wilderness, reach the promised land, and never look back. But I keep finding familiar lessons in unfamiliar places. Not a circle that takes me nowhere, but something closer to a spiral. I return to a question with a little more understanding, a little more love, a wider view.
I think of Psalm 22 and Psalm 23: the cry of distress and the Shepherd’s care. Both belong in Scripture. Both can belong to a life. I don’t need to pretend one cancels the other. God’s refining work continues, layer upon layer, through moments I recognize and moments I may not understand until much later.
And as my own perspective broadens, so does my compassion. If I could miss what was happening in my own life, how much might I fail to see in someone else’s? I don’t know the whole of another person’s journey. I can speak truthfully about what I felt and what happened to me without claiming to know what was in anyone else’s heart.
The light I saw that night mattered. The words “I want to live!” mattered. And so does the ordinary work of living now: tending to what I’ve been given, paying attention, choosing love again today.
Maybe that’s what Genesis means here. Not that God began that night, but that I began to recognize what had been there all along.
Pay attention.
One story cannot contain it all.