wake up, o sleeper
“You with your hand rubbing your forehead,” my friend says to me, chuckling, the computer like a window fusing her home and mine, and us with our rumpled faces, talking quietly in the early morning, talking of life and how it’s hard.
I do not, until the moment she says this, realize what I’ve been doing, how overwhelm and weariness—the coffee still steaming in the mug beside me, the sun not yet full in the sky—have made me lean over, and, with the fingers of one hand, begin to massage my own face. A few more sighs, and my fingers could so easily curl into a claw.
Friend is on her way offline, and I’ve run out of time to explain that I feel singed a little, that I want to glance down at my fingers now laying casually against my thigh, that I am remembering yesterday and the welts, rising like angry roads, at the edge of Riley’s hairline.
I had thought them the sign of a new eccentric guest showing up in the house where Autism lives, as I watched Riley slide a napkin, pulled taut across her face, over her mouth and up to her nose, where it billowed in the center as she exhaled. Suddenly, she had pushed the napkin up, scrubbing her forehead with it repeatedly, her fingers pressed, hard, bloodless white. I had heard her voice, coming out in a tyrannical whisper with each hard scrub. One-two-. She had paused, unsatisfied with how the numbers sounded as she’d said them, and then started again, more adamantly. One–two–
I had interrupted before she had gotten to three or could start over yet again, because of the welts, like puffy roads, looking like a silent scream.
“You’re hurting your skin,” I had said quietly, and she had jumped, startled.
It was like I’d reached out and grabbed her by the wrists.
She hadn’t known, had looked down then at that napkin still laying on her flattened fingers. The pressure she put on herself had torn holes in the paper.
Wake up, O sleeper, I had thought.
And now here I am, looking down at my own errant fingers, thinking this is what happens, Autism or not, when we take matters into our own hands. Our methods may look different, but in the end, it’s all the same, this helpless fragility our bodies articulate below the level of consciousness, this nervous fear, where our minds aren’t standing guard.
There’s a passage I’ve come to love, one I give away often and also hold close to my own heart, wherein God says through the prophet Isaiah,
fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
God speaks to us in our own vernacular, and back then, they believed the right hand had a direct connection to the heart. So, to say, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand, was like saying, I will uphold you with my true, unwayward love, or by the strength of my pure-hearted affection. I think I’m doing a thing, but it’s really God who’s holding me. In so many places in Old Testament scripture, this idea gets repeated, that God holds us, holds our hand, like a Father holding tightly to a child, or like a lover, walking beside His beloved.
He’ll hold my wrist if not my hand, because He never stops holding me, even if I forget to hold back. And no matter who speaks, God’s voice is really the one that always draws me back to the land of the living.
I am wondering, as I have many times before, as I end the call with my friend and close my laptop, if God will teach my body what I have already begun to take deeply to heart, if the stress could melt away from my shoulders as I lean into Him, if my muscles could learn to let go. Could I, instead of rubbing at my tormented thoughts from the wrong side, learn—from that place well below my consciousness where His borderless, limitless love overflows, still reaching–to reach back, for His hand? Could that become the thing I do when I don’t even realize what I’m doing? I have faith to believe it could.
I rise, pushing back from my desk, and the wondering turns to prayer. Help Riley keep reaching for you too, Lord. Heaven knows, both of us need it.
“You’re hurting your skin,” I had said to her just yesterday, and she had jumped, unaware that she’d begun to self-destruct.
“Huh?” She’d been disoriented, making time to make sense of my comment.
“You’re hurting your skin,” I had said again, gesturing toward the napkin, and then, after a moment, “Can you do something for me?”
“Huh?” She shook her head, as if to shrug off the confusion.
Awake, O sleeper.
“If you should suddenly realize you’re doing that, the scrubbing, could you try to stop yourself? Please?”
I realize now, as I slide off my glasses and leave them on top of the computer, that the request had been ridiculous. Can anyone suddenly realize such a thing on their own?
She had nodded then, and I, already incredulous, had turned to prayer, asking God to awaken her, awaken me, awaken us, the words of the prophet Zechariah unspooling in my mind. The angel who talked with me returned and woke me up, like someone awakened from sleep. Like someone startled out of self-destruction right into a full awareness–even deep down where we’re unaware of anything else–of His love. It had been, and still is, I’m thinking, as I make my way downstairs to where she sits, alone again, doing who-knows-what with her napkin, like asking for a resurrection of the heart.
