resurrection

Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I need to get out of the city, I tell friends. I need to go to the woods. I need to convalesce by the seaside. You send me photos of the languid greenery of Taipei and I dream of frolicking around on the opposite side of the world with you. Yes, a vacation would probably do me good, but it’s also true there are infinite tiny salvations here: matches strike unexpectedly in the dark, and I want desperately to hold each of them for as long as they’ll let me, a hand against the wind, just for a second. I ride the Q train across the Manhattan Bridge, watching the supposed industrial might of skyscraper and muscled steel compose itself into gossamer-thin fabric at this distance; let the texture of it arc and weave against the stilling motion of my mind. Think of what it might be like in one, five, ten years, on the Q again, returned to this moment, like a length of cloth suddenly ruched tight by a single thread, possessed with the certainty of my life and the necessity of its persistence, that from a distance I’ve already been twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-three, thinking the same thoughts and swallowed by the same view. Nighttime pierced by blinding flashes of light, or else glass and water blown all aglow against the sunset. Time passes. Or time merely is, and I situate myself orthogonal to its relentless march, making myself so thin as to allow it to move through me as fluidly as it desires.

Have I grown? Am I anything more than I used to be? I wonder if I’m somehow less, or more in all the wrong ways: more suspicious, more wounded, more witholding. I want the foolhardy certainty of seventeen again, to carom through the world on animal instinct, to make wide strides over gulfs that paralyze me at twenty-three. I feel as though I’ve lost something, some blood-rich and muscled clarity that laid the world out before me in a lovely relenting lattice. But I’ve never had anything worth having that relented on first graze. My coworker jokes about our engineering problem du jour that you’d think the fix would be easy, and I fire back that I have never, ever thought that about anything about our work, and he laughs and laughs.

Yes, never enough time for anything, nothing ever as easy or straightforward as it seems on first glance. Life an infinite fractal of complexity, forever revealing impossible next depths of subverted expectation, new shades of joy and anguish, terror and relief. How much is it possible to withstand? How much can I hold all at once? Sometimes a shape emerges out of the chaos, and I nearly weep for the release of pressure, faintly aware of some sure substrate upon which all of this is growing, and then it dissolves again and life dissembles back into taxi and streetlight and gum stuck to potholed sidewalk. It aches, but at the same time it’s enough, the possibility of return to coherence. Eden in the rearview mirror with the gates cracked a sliver.

When I leave for church this morning my roommate jokes to let him know if He comes out of the cave. I crack back that every year I wonder the same, if He’s really going to pull it off this time. Every year a rehearsal of resurrection, an amnesiac weekend wondering in the dark if the tomb will really be empty come Sunday. I move through life accumulating the small agonies of existence, confusion, exhaustion, varied senseless cruelties of both nature and mankind. I forget what it feels like to feel good and then the illumination comes unexpectedly, every year, every day, every second: God in you reaching through a rent in the dirtied fabric of life to say, I see you. I sit in the pews wracked with that same chronic pain I’ve been nursing for my entire adult life and try to stop dreaming for once of a scenario where I’m listening to this sermon pain-free and watch myself, in pain, distracted, weary, listening to the sermon, as whole as I can muster in this real moment. Yes, this is the world; it’s mine; I have nothing else. One wild and precious life.

Mostly it’s like swimming with the memory of having once experienced that exalted clarity of gulping pure air—halfway to drowning, and then taking a breath, all cold salt breeze. Underwater you think, no, this is it, half-alive is all there is, and then some blast of rightness hits you, and you think, oh, oh yeah. I thread the catacombs of the Times Square-Port Authority subway station, then surface in Prospect Heights, ascending the stairs out of the Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum stop, met with that curious lacuna in this relentlessly dense city: fat brownstones peering at you across a generously wide street, and then the regal columns and sweeping pavilion of the Brooklyn Museum, and to the east, streetlights low against the parkway taking its sweet time dwindling to a point in the horizon. A breath, a beat. Night breeze whistling, suddenly corroborating, alongside the half-visible greenery of the botanical gardens, some central theorem at the heart of it all. I walk briskly, unashamed for an infinite moment, sure that it all comes together in the end.