Hide Me Away
To have one true love is all I’ve ever wanted.
To plunge into the cold dark corners of my soul and turn over every crooked stone; in the confidence of one most closely held, is a desire stronger than any I have otherwise known.
There, these decades of constantly treading water, of bobbing beneath and reaching for air; would truly, finally, give way to the warm solidity of dry land.
To know a future that holds something, something worth staying around to see. A blooming of health and of possibility, of inside jokes and the hundreds of tiny private rituals which constitute a love worth a whole life.
To daily experience the otherness of woman, and by its strangeness; expand beyond the dull limits of sanity. To be stretched and wrenched and tortured, by a bond that swallows all other concern.
To this I have given my allegiance. For this, I hold out hope. It is my highest ambition, my greatest desire.
As the years pass and I pile my makeshift gifts at it’s altar, the specter of the dream grows in my imagination. Every wound attributed to its lack, every joy to the possibility. Higher and higher it moves; until I can see no light above it. No source of meaning which precedes it or remains outside.
Over time, I warp and derange. I am no longer a joyful servant of a goodness I may never taste, but a junkie and a slave to a degenerate idol. I have forgotten that love is not possession; but a will to will goodness regardless of its reachability. A stubborn hope logic cannot get beneath. A decision to step beyond the blood-red desire to devour.
May this stubborn hope reveal that higher light to me once again, may my allegiance to it, outstrip all else. May I accept anything in this life so long as that light stays above and with me. That the blood on my hands be washed until I am grateful to have existed at all, that I may know being itself as very good indeed.
Until every joy I have already tasted can be relished in memory, every warm morning, cherished for the goodness it itself inextricably carries.
That I may someday die with gratitude on my tongue, were my days spent hidden in the shadow of his nearness, that this nearness may redeem the scars the years have dealt.
“Every idolatry leads eventually to despair.” -Viktor Frankl