She Would Talk To Her God

She would talk to her god, often, and he would respond.

‘But,’ she would start, as far back as she could remember, ‘but why is this necessary if love is cyclic and eternal?’

He would smile at her, indulgently. ‘How will you learn it, if not again and again?’

She remembered when it all started – when she was 12 years old, convinced she was adopted and trying to jump off a third story balcony in their inner city home. She wasn’t looking or listening for a voice to tell her anything, just a relief, a passage into another world where it didn’t hurt so much.

‘Stop, stop!’

She thought she was talking to herself but she knew what her voice sounded like, and that wasn’t it.

‘Stop!’ The voice sounded sad, and it empowered her – if the voice wasn’t going to plead its case, then she was going to jump anyway.

‘Stop why?’

‘Because it hurts me more.’

She stepped away from the ledge – not because of the case, but because she was curious. Then they would have conversations, during which she never asked why god came to her, talked to her, and not to others. In fact, it all mattered less, because there was so much more to know. And so, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood blurred together through an anchor of conversations with a best friend.

What do you ask a god when you have the chance? For wealth? For understanding? For peace? She asked for none of these, almost as a surety for when she would really need something. He never asked anything of her, except to not throw away what he gave.

As young adulthood goes, she met someone to love, and god was worried.

‘He makes me sing,’ she smiled, and he nodded, because music is beautiful.

‘He makes me dance,’ she laughed, and he nodded, because dancing is the movement of the soul.

‘He wants my all,’ she told him, and he hid his frown, because he had not given her a life to simply give away.

Then the day came that she made the request of him, in tears, on a ledge much like the one he talked her off of a decade ago.

‘He doesn’t love me. Please. Make him love me!’ she weeped, sobbing tears of sorrow. He shook his head.

‘But why? Why won’t you give me what I want?’

‘Because his love is not mine to give to you, just the way you can choose who you love.’

‘No!’ She railed. ‘I must have him! He must be mine!’ And when she turned her back on her god, her voice, her god left her, for as soon as she left love, she left herself.

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