“impending”
This is not an “Africa Journal”. This is a mindstream taken directly from my journal, recorded just about an hour ago as I watched a massive, ferocious storm light up the sky. It is simply my thoughts, feelings and memories as they came to me. This is effectively unedited. Please excuse the use of both past and present phrases. listen, do not fear.
I watched the storm approach. A tempest was already raging deep inside of me. I thought of Ronan’s timeless, inked words, “These are not words. They’re only feelings. There are no sounds that you can hear. There are no forms that you can touch. I tell myself, I keep repeating, that your ways are bringing you to me.” Yes, I thought to myself. I watched the storm approach the same way you watch the approaching moment your best friend marries the love of his life. It is that particular mix of joy and longing that steeled my soul in that moment. As the stars disappeared it felt like a warm embrace from a lover long since removed. I reveled in the moment and in impending fury.
The whole day I’ve spent considering the narrative of my life and the struggles and pain that seem to grow stronger every day. The flashbacks are more constant now as a dozen spent pens can attest to. There was this moment that came amidst the thousandth page of other’s pain that I was reading in which I started to feel myself. The loss and anger broke through the numbness and deadness that are my constant jailors, enslaving and yet protecting me from this overwhelming urge to stand in the lightening storm just to test my life, to prove that I’m still alive. It’s not safe to feel like this and people will ask, “What is wrong?” as if the catacomb of silence is an almost necessary state to experience the truth of my experience. How can I describe what it means to be an iceberg with the danger laying mostly beneath the surface? And yet that old friend, violence, having breached my prison bars embraced me. Now with the storm enveloping me I took the time to embrace back. It had been too long.
I thought of the stories that I’ve heard, both the hundreds and the few that have truly, utterly broken my heart. I remember the stories of others that have cost me more than my life. I consider that embrace, that rage, that impeccable desire for both wrath and shalom, that violence that courses through my veins. I can hear it pumping in the ringing silence of my ears. The storm is still too far away to be heard, but I know it draws nearer. The tears run stream down my face picking up the ashes that are imbued in my sackcloth soul in some ceremonial gray mud of remembrance. I stifle a scream, a scream to protest with God. “Why?!” is not a sufficient question. “You.” That is the accusation I level at the nameless, faceless person who embodies that which took everything and took it in the name of God. I would take your life. I would rip the page from the book and burn it alive.
Violence, I know. The streaks across the perilous sky remind me of counter-battery fire and the death that each audible report attests to. I think of the charred bodies, the blood stained glass, and the open graves. This, after all, is war. I think of the exchanges of hatred and fire and how such violence is the manifestation of that rage, that fury that is both boundless and patient. “You”, I whisper in to the now windy emptiness. It is black as sin out here despite the magnificent flashes and the irony is not lost on me.
“I hate you with the justice of a thousand nights that I’ve longed for, prayed for healing.” Yet I know that my own anger is second only to another’s. And by what right do I have to take their pain and make it my own? But it is now my own. I do not know where theirs ends and mine begins. “Someday”, I think. I stare intently at the flashes ignoring every close sound in hopes of hearing the distant sounds of fury. I want to hear it, but more than that I want to taste it. I want to know it. I want to remember that I was not there at the foundations of this earth and yet I will brace like a man for the impending gale. My heart and head collide as I hear the chorus of breakdown ring in my ears as I scream inwards, “Make him beg for his life!!!!” With the intensity only learnt through years of waiting for the opportunity.
But then the prose of feeling drops dead from my lips and as it hits the ground I stomp on its lifeless existence a couple of times just to make sure. The blood is again pumping in my ears and I think of the knife and the cold intimacy it represents. In the end only one of us walks away.
The wind is harder now. I wonder if it will carry me home.
And to think, I am standing here because of love.
