I Want to Stay Here

 

I am 47 years old.  I still want to wander.  I am taking a writing class and a literature class, and I am married, though we are not in practice at the moment.  It has been a year since last Wednesday.  In those hours, to my husband, we have been: in-love, divorced, married, separated, engaged, and divorced again.  Right now I think we are imagining ourselves, whatever that means…

Today, I have studied and completed my homework, been a handyman, and a chef; and I have prayed. A lot.

I love him immensely, but God has told me to get out of the way.  So I did.  I am staying at my ex-sister-in-law’s house.  I had to install a ceiling light fixture and I’m sleeping on my camping foam.

I want to stay here.

God turned on a light.  Pulled scales from my eyes again.  However, this time, the revelation was not regarding me.  I saw my husband and it drove me to the ground in tears.  He has no peace and has never known true freedom!  My heart broke.  He was made so perfect, so intricately with the Father’s delicate fingers.  So brilliant.  So kind.  So generous. Strong. Beautiful.  But the world has wanted him back.  She wants again what she stole in his youth.  She spat in my face and it sprayed into my mouth so I could taste her rancid breath.  He is now 50 years old.  Will he ever know?

I want to stay at my ex-sister-in-law’s until I know.  

I have no animosity - well - very little: the trite animosity of languid irritation that is unavoidable when you melt two lives together.  But for these bigger things, those I pray for.  Those I cry for. The tortured soul of the broken.

I want to stay because here I have peace and freedom.  Here I have God all to myself; and He has me.  I did not cause my husband’s darkness; nor did he cause mine.  But I see, yet again, God’s hand in my dim and bruised life giving me courage to dig the darkness out.  Expose it.  Dry it out.  And heal it!  The deluge of muck and misery was not to course in the rivers of my life, though it tried and trickled and broke through many damns.  My husband has not been so fortunate.  For whatever reason, he has ridden the torrent of the darkness, where the world broke his lamp, and it has flooded into me for too many Springs.  I exclaim to God to heal him!  Damn up that wretched slick and let him dry out.  Let him breath Your breath!  Even if he has left me behind.

But my husband still has scales.  I will be this broken man’s wife until he rages no more on this rock - even if he is not my husband.

I want to stay here.  In peace and freedom and prayer.  If scales are washed from his eyes and he takes up a shovel, then I will run home.  But the Lord has said, “Give Me room.  I need you out of the way.”

Today, my husband's latest ask was for us to find our vision as a married couple.  This is his solution to the darkness, though he doesn’t see the darkness - only its death.  But I cannot share my vision.  He is not in my vision - there are reasons... and I am not in ours.  Our vision will most certainly be his vision.  My vision is a life of thought-pushing.  I pack light.  I wonder.  And I wander.  I am not in his way and no one is in mine.  My vision is a wood bench and a wood chair in a wood box on the slopes of words themselves.  Where I can write, say, push a thought until it stabs the catcher - changing his or her scales forever.

My husband loves me, but he doesn’t ask about my vision - he doesn’t ask about my words.  How will he ever find me?

Is he looking?

Is it narcissistic for me to want him to?