with me
Into the thin of night, during those turbulent hours when panic threatens the best of our rest; during those hours when the conversations of young friends become so exposed that with raw, sleepy voices they begin to truly know each other; during those hours when so many souls bound for home finally drift away; into that black cavern of time comes a broken, heart-stinging sound: a shattering crash, a crack that smacks us awake.
We gasp, coming unhuddled, and Kevin says what both of us are thinking, “What was that?”
His voice hardly sounds like the voice of a husband crack-dragged from sleep at 3am; he sounds like a father, awake in an instant.
I drag my body up to a sitting position, swing my legs over the side of the bed, and I can feel from the shift in the mattress, that he’s doing the same. We wander toward the bathroom, which in general follows the origin of the sound, if not the body’s first ideas about what must take place upon a jarring reentry into wakefulness, and as I step carefully, feeling the cool vinyl beneath my feet, something glances off the side of my toe and rattles across the floor. It sounds like a pebble made of glass.
“Something here has broken,” I say quietly, and behind me, Kevin flicks on the light, which, too brilliant for my sleep-clogged eyes, blinds me before it makes everything clear. Wearily I smile, thinking the momently oddly not so incongruent with a memory resting in my mind, a recent sunrise, when we sat together, side-by-side, gazing out at the ocean.
That morning, the wind made the sea writhe like a great black beast, whipping seafoam into a veiny web across the underbelly of a curling the wave. It ruffled the salt-and-pepper hair that fell lightly over Kevin’s forehead. I glanced at him and he smiled and then we both turned back to watch the red-gold burn just visible below steely clouds. A storm, blurring the horizon with rain like a smear, slowly opened its yap to gobble up the sun, so slowly it could be a sneak attack, and suddenly, gloriously, warm rays shot out of its dark belly like swords. Immediately, I understood: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The spectacle stilled us. For a moment, I stared into the pitch dark waves. They fell and broke apart like precious things grabbed up in anger and thrown, shattering against the floor. The storm spread, like a bruise, right along the horizon, where the sky seems to meet the sea, where one rises and the other falls, like lovers who destroy something every time they come together. All that darkness–so much, so deep, as far as my eyes could see, but when I lifted my gaze, streams of golden sunlight light blinded me. I reached for my phone, wanting to take a picture, wanting to somehow capture the breathtaking contrast, which felt to me like a holy comment.
I cradled a mug of coffee in one hand and reached out with the other, dangling my fingers over the space between our chairs, and in a moment, even though we were still both watching the horizon, Kevin’s hand drifted toward my own. He was warm; I felt the heat of his life radiating through his fingers as they lightly rested on the back of my hand, and I thought: His love is a gift; it’s grace. This oneness we know with each other isn’t completely ours and it isn’t completely unique to us, but storm or sun, he is mine and I am his. He reminds me that God is with me, always.
I know this love isn’t ours because we excel at marriage; it isn’t ours because we’re easy.
No, it’s hard, we’re hard, everything is hard, I’m thinking now, feeling violated and somehow bereft as a tired ache crawls over my spine, as I stand barefoot in the bathroom in the thin of night, seeing, as my vision adjusts to the light, that a glass shelf beside the bathtub has spontaneously exploded. I see nothing that could have crashed against it. It didn’t fall; the steel frame sits solid, still bolted to the wall. The broken glass looks like rock salt or knobby bits of beach glass, blue like water, not clear as it appeared to be when whole and flat and functional. Shattering does bring things back to authenticity, or at least, it creates something entirely new, something changed. A box of tissue, the only thing sitting on the shelf when it broke, sits crookedly now on the shelf below, balanced on top of a candle and a soap dish holding an extra bar. Sharp glass stones, dangerously stunning, glitter everywhere, some collected on the lower shelf, crowded with the soap in the dish, some far flung across the floor, clotting bathmats, some pooled around the bathtub drain. I’m overly dramatic when exhausted, I know this, but at the moment this feels representative. Our life is a series of sudden collapses–seizures, diabetic emergencies, panic attacks, the unpredictable rigidness of Autism, grief. So much darkness, so deep, as far as my eyes can see.
But then, Riley’s smile, Adam’s laughter, Zoe’s kindness, these are the blinding rays; their love in our lives is the sun.
Kevin’s hand settles against my waist. He had gone to get a broom, but before he sweeps a path through the broken bits, he stops to touch me. I am yours and you are mine. And I remember: God is with me, always.
I don’t know all the reasons why some marriages work and others don’t, why for some family relationships only bring pain, why some soul-wounds slice like shards and others only create shadows. I don’t know why some abuses multiply and others scab over and finally heal. I don’t know all the secrets to fidelity and longevity. Some things just break here; there doesn’t always seem to be a reason. Brokenness is universal. My brokenness is your wholeness; my sun is your storm. God doesn’t play favorites. Jesus said God causes the sun to rise on us all and the rain to fall on us all, no matter how good we think we are or claim to be, no matter how evil. Storm or sun, God loves us and never leaves, that was His point. Suffering isn’t a punishment; grace isn’t a reward, and we are here, facing it all, together.
Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
