Love Without Borders
Chapter Five
The wave breaks.
It does not crash the way waves crash on a shore, with noise and foam and the hard drag of water over sand. It breaks the way dawn breaks, the way understanding breaks, the way a held breath breaks when the body finally lets go and the air comes rushing in. The question that was forming in the light, building in the warmth between us, gathering shape the way a wave gathers height far out at sea, arrives all at once and without words, and I receive it the way a shore receives the tide: not by bracing but by opening.
Come in.
That is the whole of it. Not a contract. Not a set of terms. Not a checklist of beliefs to affirm or a list of conditions to meet. Just this, the simplest and most total invitation I have ever felt: come in. Come in the way a child comes in from the cold, the way a traveler comes in through a door she has been walking toward her whole life without knowing it was there. Come in and be received. Come in and stay. Come in and let the threshold that has stood between you and the thing you reached for your whole life dissolve, because it was never mine to enforce, it was yours to cross, and now is the crossing.
I stand in the invitation the way you stand in sudden warmth after a long cold, letting it find every part of you, the backs of your hands, the soles of your feet, the place behind your ears where the chill always lodges last. The offer is not a moment. It is more like a climate, a temperature, a quality of the light that has changed without the source moving, as if the Presence that has been turned toward me since the silence began has opened a door inside itself and the opening is the invitation. He is not holding something out for me to take. He is holding Himself open for me to enter. And the difference between those two things is the difference between a gift and a home.
I think: this is what the ache was for.
I have thought this before. I thought it minutes ago, or hours ago, or ages ago, in the seeing, when He held up the heron and the lake and the pancakes and the October trees and showed me the thread that ran through all of them. But this is different. This is the thought arriving not as understanding but as decision. The ache was not an accident of my nervous system. It was not the misfiring of a brain that evolved to detect patterns in a patternless universe. It was a compass, and the needle pointed here, and here is a Someone, and the Someone is asking me to stay, and the staying is not the end of the reaching but the fulfillment of it, the thing the reaching was always reaching for, the word the ache could never finish saying.
I understand, in the way you understand a flavor or a touch, not with the thinking part of me but with the part that has always known before the thinking catches up, that what is being offered is not a transaction. He is not saying: believe these things about Me and I will give you entry. He is not saying: repent of the cruelty to Tara and the lie on the couch and the snap at your mother and I will let you pass. The seeing has already happened. The truth has already been held up, every bright part and every hidden part, and the holding did not produce a verdict. It produced this. This opening. This invitation that rises out of the total seeing the way a flower rises out of the soil that holds its roots, the seeing and the offer not two separate things but one thing, one motion, one love that sees and wants and opens all in the same breath.
What He is offering is Himself. That is the staggering part. Not a reward, not an afterlife, not a mansion with many rooms or a paradise with gates made of pearl or whatever it is that the stories promise. Himself. The beauty I reached for and could not keep. The warmth I felt in the light on the lake and in my mother’s humming and in Reed’s steady hands. The Someone behind every someone. He is the offer. He is asking me to receive the very thing I have been dying of the lack of, and the asking is so simple that I almost cannot believe it is real, because nothing in my life has ever been this simple, this stripped of condition, this clean.
Come in. Be Mine. Let me be yours.
These are not His words. He has not spoken words. But they are the shape of the invitation the way a melody is the shape of the silence between the notes, and I feel them in my chest, in the old place, the ache-place, the socket that has been waiting for the key since before I can remember, and the key is turning, and the lock is so ready to open that it takes almost no pressure at all, just the slightest turning, just the smallest act of will, just the word that has been building in me since the recognition, since the light, since the first moment I looked into the face and knew.
Almost no pressure at all. But not none.
I want to be honest about this. Even here, even now, even standing in a love so total it makes every other love I have known look like a candle held up to the sun, there is a moment when the yes is not yet given, when I stand at the open door and the warmth is pouring through and the face is waiting and the light is full and I have not yet stepped across. A moment when I could still refuse. Not because I want to. Not because anything in me resists. But because the yes, when it comes, must come from me. It must be my word, my step, my choosing. The love that brought me here will not take the step for me. It brought me to the door and opened it and showed me everything on the other side and waited, and the waiting is not impatience and not indifference but the most careful, costly restraint I can imagine, the restraint of a love that wants me so badly it aches (and I know, suddenly, that the ache was His too, all along, His ache as well as mine, the ache of the One who stands on the other side of every door and waits for the handle to turn from the inside) and will not, even now, reach through and pull me across.
There is a freedom in this that I did not expect.
I thought, if I ever found the thing I was looking for, that the finding would feel like inevitability. Like falling. Like a current too strong to swim against, carrying me whether I chose to go or not. I thought the beauty that breaks me open would, at last, break me so completely that no choice would be left, that the ache and the answer would meet with such force that I would be swept in without consent, the way a river sweeps a leaf into the sea.
It is not like that. The love is total and the light is overwhelming and the face is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and I want it more than I have ever wanted anything, more than Reed’s hands, more than my mother’s voice, more than the heron lifting off the lake in the cold November morning, and still the choice is mine. Still the door does not close behind me without my walking through it. Still there is a threshold under my feet and I am standing on it and the step is mine to take or not take, and the taking is not the inevitable result of everything that has come before but a new thing, a first thing, the freest act I have ever been asked to perform.
He is not compelling me. That word arrives in me with a force that surprises me, because I did not know it was the word I needed until it arrived. He is not compelling me. He has shown me everything. He has shown me the heron and the pancakes and the October trees and the cruelty at the party and the lie on the couch and the grandmother’s hand on my face and the whole long record of the ache and its meaning, and none of it was a tactic, none of it was a strategy designed to break down my resistance and extract a compliance. It was truth. Shown with love. Shown so that I could see clearly, for the first time, what I was being asked to choose, and then choose freely, because the choice is the point, because a love that forces itself is not love but possession, and what He wants is not to possess me but to have me, and the having is only real if I give myself, and the giving is only real if I could have withheld.
I could withhold. I feel the reality of that possibility the way you feel the reality of a ledge when you stand at its edge and look down: not because you intend to jump but because the height is real and the possibility is real and the reality of it is what makes the choice to step back mean something. I could say no. I could turn from this light and this warmth and this face and walk into whatever lies on the other side of refusal, and He would let me go, and the letting would break His heart the way it would break mine, but He would do it, because the freedom is not negotiable, not even for Him, not even at the cost of losing me.
But I am not going to refuse. And I want to say this clearly too, because the clarity matters: the freedom does not make me hesitate. The knowledge that I could say no does not slow my yes. It deepens it. It makes the yes mine in a way that nothing coerced could ever be. I am choosing this. Not because the ache has left me no alternative, not because the beauty has bludgeoned me into compliance, not because the truth of my own life has shamed me into surrender. I am choosing this because I see, at last, what I was reaching for, and it is better than anything I imagined, and the reaching and the finding are about to meet, and the meeting is a homecoming, and the homecoming is a person, and the person is Him, and I want Him the way the lungs want air, the way the root wants water, the way the note wants the chord, and the wanting is not desperation but recognition, the body’s oldest and most honest knowing: this is what I was made for.
I think about my mother one more time.
Not with grief, though the missing is still there, sitting inside the joy like a low note in a high chord. I think about her because the yes I am about to give is related, somehow, to the yes she gave when she decided to keep me. I do not mean this in any theological way. My mother is not a theologian. She is a woman who makes tea when someone is sick and fills the bird feeder every Saturday and carried me for nine months and chose, in the ordinary, unremarkable way that most mothers choose, to bring me into the world and to love me in it. But the choosing was real. She could have chosen otherwise. And because she chose me, I exist, and because I exist, I am here, in this light, at this door, about to choose in return.
The symmetry does not feel like coincidence. It feels like a sentence that was begun a long time ago and is about to be completed. My mother chose me. I am about to choose Him. And He, I understand now, chose both of us before either choice was made, chose my mother and chose me and chose the morning with the pancakes and the heron on the lake and the night my grandmother died and every moment, every single one, because the choosing is who He is, not something He does, and the love is not a decision He makes but the ground He stands on, the ground everything stands on, and my yes is not the beginning of the story but the last line of a chapter He has been writing since the first cell divided in my mother’s body, since the first star caught fire, since before the word before had anything to refer to.
I think about Reed. My steady, solid, managing Reed, who would have built a shelter out of the wreckage and carried me to safety and never once asked for help, because that is not how he is built, because the asking is the thing he cannot do. I think about his hands on the steering wheel, the last image I have of the living world, and I love him with a love that does not diminish in the light but clarifies, the way a photograph clarifies in the developing bath, the shapes emerging sharper and truer from the wash. I loved Reed before I knew why. Now I know why. He was a gift from the One who is giving me everything, placed in my path the way a lantern is placed on a dark road, not as the destination but as the light that makes the walking possible. I loved him, and the love was real, and I love him still, and the still is not a diminishing but a holding, a keeping, a trust that what I am giving him to is the same love that gave him to me.
Where is he? The question rises again, gentle and unforced, the way it rose before. I do not know. The Presence does not tell me, and the not-telling is not cruelty but care, because there are things that are not mine to carry and Reed is one of them, not because he does not matter but because he matters too much for me to hold on to him in a way that would turn the holding into a grip. I release him. I release my mother. I release Tara and the house on Birch Street and the cabin at the end of the gravel road and the finches at the feeder and the whole, bright, ordinary, aching world that I loved so much it broke my heart and healed it and broke it again every time the light hit the water at the right angle. I release all of it, not because it was not good but because it was, because every good thing in it was a word spoken by the One who is asking for my yes, and the yes includes the releasing, and the releasing is not loss but trust: the placing of every loved thing into hands that loved them first and will love them last and have never, for one instant, set them down.
This is what surrender feels like. Not defeat. Not the white flag and the empty hands and the bitter swallowing of pride that the word usually means. It feels like setting down a suitcase you did not know you were carrying until the weight of it was gone. It feels like breathing after holding your breath for twenty-one years. It feels like the moment on the porch, with the coffee and the heron and the mist, except that the moment does not end, and the beauty does not leave, and the ache does not close the door behind it as it goes, because the door is open, the door is finally, fully, irreversibly open, and I am going through.
Yes.
The word does not come from my mouth. I do not have a mouth, not in the way I used to, not lips and tongue and teeth and the muscular coordination that turns air into speech. The word comes from whatever I am, from the center, from the place where the ache lived and the reaching started and the key fit the lock that was shaped like Him. It comes from a deeper place than speech. It comes from the place where I first felt the homesickness and did not know its name. It comes the way a river comes to the sea: not by force, not by accident, but by the slope of the land, by the shape of the ground it has been following since it left the mountain.
Yes.
I am choosing this. I want Him to know I am choosing this, though He already knows, though He knew before I knew, because the knowing is who He is and the choosing is who I am, and the two are meeting now, in this word, in this yes, and the meeting is not a collision but a homecoming, not an ending but the beginning of everything that matters.
Yes, I say, with everything I am. Yes to the face that has been watching me since the light began. Yes to the beauty I could never keep and now do not have to, because it is not a thing to be kept but a Someone to be received, and I am receiving Him, and the receiving is the simplest thing I have ever done and the most complete. Yes to being known. Yes to the cruelty at the party and the lie on the couch and the snap at my mother and all the failures, because the yes is not a yes to being perfect but a yes to being seen, wholly seen, and still wanted. Yes to the wanting. Yes to His wanting of me and my wanting of Him and the great, mutual, staggering wanting that turns out to have been the engine of everything, the force behind every ache and every beauty and every reaching that I ever felt.
Yes to the heron and the pancakes and the October trees and the grandmother’s hand and the snow and the stars and the party where I met Reed and the night I held his hand while he cried. Yes to all of it, because all of it was Him, and the yes is not to the moments but to the One who made them, and the making was love, and the love is here, and I am saying yes to it the way you say yes to morning when you open your eyes and the light is already there.
The word fills the space between us. Not as sound. As presence. As the closing of the last, smallest distance, the hairline gap between the reaching and the finding, between the ache and the answer, between the lock and the key. The yes crosses the gap and the gap ceases to exist, and what remains is not a gap but a place, a home, a belonging so total that the word belonging is too small for it, the way a teacup is too small for the ocean, and I am in the ocean now, and the ocean is Him, and the swimming is not swimming but resting, because the water holds me the way His light has been holding me, the way His warmth has been holding me, the way His face has been holding me since the noise stopped and the silence began and the body fell away and the real waking started.
I said yes. I am still saying it. The yes is not a moment that passes. It is a door that opens and stays open, a breath that is drawn and never released, a note that is struck and goes on ringing. I am inside my own yes the way a bird is inside the sky, held by it, carried by it, made more fully itself by the vastness it inhabits. And He is inside my yes too, filling it, answering it, meeting it with a yes of His own that I can feel the way you feel the resonance when two notes find their harmony, a vibration in the bones, in the blood, in whatever I am made of now that the body is gone and only the essential thing remains.
His yes. That is the part I did not expect. I knew, or I thought I knew, that the offering was His and the accepting was mine, and that the transaction, if you could call it that, moved in one direction: from Him to me, from the giver to the given-to, from the one who holds the door to the one who walks through it. But it is not one direction. It is two. He is saying yes to me with the same fullness that I am saying yes to Him, and His yes is older than mine, was spoken before mine was possible, has been spoken into every ache and every reaching and every beauty that broke me open, and what I am hearing now, what I am feeling now, is the yes that has been echoing underneath my whole life, the yes He said to me before I had a name, before I had a body, before the first morning with the pancakes and the first heron on the first lake, and the hearing of it is the most astonishing thing that has happened in a sequence of astonishing things, because it means that the reaching was never only mine. He was reaching too. He was reaching from the other side of every door I could not open, pressing against the wood, sending light through the cracks, aching (and He aches, I know this now, He aches the way love aches when it cannot yet be received, the way a parent aches when a child walks in the rain and will not come inside), and the aching was mutual, and the meeting is mutual, and the yes is mutual, and the mutuality is the whole point, the whole story, the whole reason for everything.
Something changes.
I do not know how to describe the change because I do not have a frame for it, the way a person born in a country with no seasons would not have a frame for the first day of spring. The light, which has been steady and warm and personal since the silence began, does something new. It deepens. That is the closest word, though it is not close enough. It deepens the way water deepens when you wade from the shallows into the lake and the sand drops away under your feet and the water rises from your ankles to your waist to your chest and then there is no bottom anymore, only depth, only the held suspension of being surrounded and supported by something that has no end in any direction. The light does this. It deepens around me and the deepening is not darkness, it is the opposite of darkness, it is more light, light upon light, warmth upon warmth, the face closer, the knowing closer, everything closer, as if the yes I spoke was a door and the door opened inward, into Him, and I am going in.
Going in. I cannot say this any other way. Movement into and toward, not away, not down, not the falling that dying is supposed to be but the opposite of falling, a rising that is also an entering, a going-forward that is also a coming-home, and the home is not a place but a person, and the person is opening to receive me the way the light opened to show me the truth, with the same gentleness, the same patience, the same absolute, unshakeable, specific love that knows my name and my shame and my reaching and my cruelty and wants me anyway, wants me with all of it, not in spite of it, because the love is not a love that subtracts the bad and keeps the good but a love that holds the whole painting, every color, every brushstroke, and calls it beautiful.
The threshold. I am on it. I can feel it the way you feel the edge of sleep, the last instant of wakefulness before the dreaming begins, except this is the opposite of sleep, this is the last instant of the old waking before the real waking begins, and the real waking is so much more awake than the old waking that the old waking, by comparison, was a kind of sleeping, a beautiful, ordinary, aching sleep in which the heron and the pancakes and the October trees were dreams of a morning I had not yet entered.
I am entering it now. The morning. The real morning. The one that was always behind every other morning, the light that was always behind every other light, the warmth that was always behind my mother’s humming and Reed’s steady hands and Tara’s laugh and my grandmother’s face smoothed into that expression of completion. Every beautiful thing I ever loved was a shadow thrown by this, and I am stepping out of the room of shadows into the light that cast them, and the stepping is the yes in motion, the yes with legs, the yes walking me forward into the place where the reaching ends because the reaching has arrived.
I think of the door that would not open. The image that has lived in me since I was old enough to feel the ache: a door at the back of every beautiful moment, closed, just out of reach, the knob always an inch farther than my hand could stretch. Every sunset, every piece of music that stopped my breath, every face I loved, every morning that cracked me open with its tenderness: behind them, the door, and behind the door, something I could sense but never see, smell but never taste, hear but never answer.
The door is gone. Not opened. Gone. It was never a door. It was the thinness of the world itself, the fine membrane between the real and the real behind the real, and the membrane has dissolved, and I am stepping through the place where it was, and what is on the other side is not a room and not a garden and not a city of gold and not a cloud and not any of the images that the stories use to make the unimaginable fit inside a frame. What is on the other side is Him. Only Him. Him in a fullness that makes the Presence I have been standing in for the last however-long feel like the warmth of a match held up against the sun, not because the match was not real but because the sun is so much more real that the match, in comparison, was only a promise of warmth, a rehearsal, a foretaste of the thing itself.
The thing itself. I am in it. I am in Him. The yes brought me here and the here is not a location but a state, a way of being, a quality of existence that I do not have a vocabulary for because nothing in the living world prepared me for it except the ache, and the ache was only the negative space around this, the Lena-shaped hole that this was always meant to fill.
I want to describe what it is like. I owe the telling to someone, to the world I have left, to my mother and Tara and Reed and to every person who has ever stood on a porch in the cold and felt the reaching and not known where it led. But the telling keeps falling short. The words are a net and the thing is the sea, and every word I throw comes back with water dripping through the holes, holding the shape of what it touched but not the thing itself.
I will try anyway, because the trying is part of the joy.
It is like warmth, but not the warmth of a fire or a blanket or a hand held against your cheek. It is warmth the way love is warmth, the way being known is warmth, the way the phrase welcome home is warmth when you have been gone a long time and the one who says it means it with their whole body. A warmth that does not come from outside and enter in but that rises from the center of me, from the place where His yes and my yes met and fused and became a single thing, the warmth of a belonging so complete that the concept of outside has lost its meaning. There is no outside. There is only in, and in is warm, and the warmth has no edge.
It is like light, but not the light of a lamp or a star or a morning sky. It is light the way understanding is light, the way a truth that has been struggling to break through finally breaks and the mind fills with it and everything looks different, not because the things have changed but because the seeing has. I am seeing with a clarity I did not know was possible. The old seeing, the seeing I did my whole life, with eyes and brain and the slow, sequential interpretation of photons, was like reading a language one letter at a time. This seeing is like reading a whole page at once, every word in its place, every meaning connected to every other meaning, the whole text alive and complete and held in a single look.
It is like being held, but not the way Reed held me or my mother held me, with arms and pressure and the limited circumference of a human embrace. It is being held the way the sea holds a swimmer: entirely, from every direction, with a force that is not grip but buoyancy, not constraint but support. I am held and I am free, and the holding and the freedom are not in tension but are the same thing, the same love, expressed in two directions at once, inward and outward, I have you and go anywhere, and the anywhere is inside Him, and inside Him is everywhere, and everywhere is home.
It is like music. Not a specific piece, not a melody I can hum, but the quality of music that I have always loved, the quality that made me cry in the car when a particular chord progression caught the ache at its exact frequency and shook it loose. That quality is here, not as sound but as structure, as the underlying pattern of a reality that is, at its deepest level, harmonious, not in the thin, sugary way of a pop song but in the deep, complex, resolved way of a piece that has earned its final chord through dissonance and tension and long passages of uncertainty, and the final chord is this, this place, this arrival, and I am inside it, and the resolution holds me the way a chord holds a note, giving it context, giving it meaning, giving it the other notes it needs to be fully itself.
Time. There is no time here, or there is a different kind of time, a time that does not move forward like a river but pools like water in a basin, deep and still and warm. I am in the pool. The moment of the yes and the moment of the entering and this moment, now, are not three separate moments but one moment, one unbroken present that does not tick or pass or count itself but simply is, the way He simply is, the way love simply is, the way the deepest truths I have ever felt did not arrive in sequence but were always already there, waiting for me to notice.
I notice now. I notice everything. Not in the scanning, sequential, one-thing-at-a-time way of the living brain, with its narrow spotlight of attention that could only hold a few objects at once and had to keep moving to take in the room. I notice the way the light notices: all at once, from every angle, without effort or priority, everything equally clear, equally present, equally loved. And what I notice, what fills the noticing, is the sheer goodness of this. The plain, unreduced, unsentimental goodness of being here, in Him, known and wanted and held and free. The goodness is not a feeling. It is a fact. The most solid fact I have ever encountered, more solid than the floor of my mother’s kitchen, more real than Reed’s hand on my shoulder, more present than the cold glass of the car window against my forehead on the last afternoon of my life. This is the thing. The real thing. The thing behind the things. And I am in it.
He is here. I keep saying this, and I will keep saying it, because the hereness of Him is the point, the center, the axis around which everything else turns. He is here not as a figure in a field or a voice in a room or a glow at the end of a corridor. He is here the way the ocean is here when you are swimming in it: around, above, below, within, the medium in which I move and breathe and have whatever being I have now, which is more being than I have ever had, more self than I have ever been, more Lena than I was when I was alive, because the Lena I was when I was alive was a woman looking at her own reflection in a dark window, and the Lena I am now is the same woman, in daylight, seeing herself clearly for the first time.
I see myself. The seeing is part of the gift. In the earlier seeing, the life review, He showed me who I was, the bright parts and the hidden parts, and I accepted the showing because His love made it safe. Now the seeing goes deeper, past the events, past the moments, past the good deeds and the small cruelties, down to the thing underneath all of it: the self, the original Lena, the one who existed before the layers of habit and fear and performance were laid on, the one I was before I learned to be careful, before I learned to smile when I was not fine, before I learned to bury the reaching so that people would not think I was strange.
She is here. That Lena. The unguarded one, the one who cried at gas station sunsets and felt the beauty of the world as a kind of wound and did not know why. She is here and she is not strange. She is not broken, not dramatic, not impractical, not the endearing oddity that Reed loved with gentle bewilderment. She is the truest thing about me. She is the part of me that was always turned toward Him, the part that heard the music through the wall and leaned toward it, the part that felt the ache and did not numb it or dismiss it or explain it away but held it, open-handed, like a compass, letting it point wherever it pointed, trusting the pointing even when the destination was invisible.
The reaching was the truest thing I ever did. I know this now with a certainty that sits in me like a stone in a riverbed, smooth and heavy and absolutely still. The reaching was not weakness. It was not naivety. It was not the misfiring of a brain wired for pattern recognition in a universe that offered none. It was the deepest sanity, the most rational act a person could perform: the act of responding to a love that was really there, really calling, really pressing against the door from the other side, really sending the heron and the pancakes and the October trees as invitations to a party that would not start until I arrived, and now I have arrived, and the party is Him, and the invitation was always an invitation to come home.
Home. The word rings through me like a bell. Not the apartment I share with Reed, with its second-hand couch and its kitchen that smells of coffee and onions and the particular warmth of two people building a life in a small space. Not my mother’s house, with the bird feeder and the humming and the tea and the photos on the fridge held in place with magnets shaped like fruit. Not any house, any room, any structure of wood and glass and the accumulated objects of a life. Home the way the word was always meant and never quite meant: the place where you are fully yourself and fully received, where the being and the belonging are the same thing, where you do not perform or manage or accommodate but simply are, and the simply-being is enough, is more than enough, is the whole point.
I am home.
I think, one last time, about the people I love.
Not with grief. The grief was real and is real, the missing of my mother’s hands and Reed’s shoulder and Tara’s laugh, and I do not pretend it is not there. But the grief sits inside the joy the way a seed sits inside a fruit, enclosed, held, carried forward, not denied but transformed, taken up into something so much larger than itself that it cannot be the whole story anymore. The missing is real. The having is more real. And the having is not a having-instead-of but a having-that-includes, a love so large it holds the grief inside itself without being diminished by it, the way the sea holds a cup of salt without becoming less than the sea.
I think of my mother filling the bird feeder on a Saturday morning, her back to the kitchen window, her breath visible in the cold, her hands steady and patient as she pours the seed into the little wooden house and waits for the finches to come. I think of the finches coming. I think of the way she stands there watching them, her face soft with a happiness that asks for nothing, that simply is, that rises from the act of feeding small, bright, undeserving birds who will eat the seed and leave and never know who filled the house. I think she learned this from Him. I think the filling of the bird feeder is a prayer she does not know she is praying, an image of the love she is inside of without knowing it, the love that fills and fills and asks for nothing and waits with infinite patience for the ones it feeds to look up and see the hand. She will look up. I know this the way I know the light is warm. I do not know when. I do not know how. But I know the same love that reached me through the ache and the heron and the October trees will reach her, in whatever way she needs to be reached, in whatever language her particular heart can hear, and the reaching will not stop until she is here, in this warmth, in this home, and we are together again, not in the way we were together before, across a kitchen table, passing the cream, but in a way that includes all of that and goes so far beyond it that the kitchen table, when it is remembered, will be luminous with a meaning we could not see when we were sitting at it.
I think of Reed. My floor, my railing, my steady man. I think of his hands on the wheel and the set of his jaw and the way he squares his shoulders when the weather turns, and I love him with a love that is fiercer now than it was when I had arms to hold him with, because the love is no longer filtered through my need for his solidity. I loved Reed partly because he managed things, partly because his certainty was the ground I stood on while I reached. Now I see him from inside the reaching fulfilled, from inside the answer, and what I see is not his competence but his hunger, the deep, carefully managed, never-spoken hunger of a man who has spent his whole life holding himself up and has never once let himself be held. He does not know he is hungry. He thinks he is fine. He thinks the managing is enough, that the competence is the whole of him, that the record of his capability is the measure of his worth. It is not. The worth is underneath the record, underneath the competence, underneath the floor he has built for himself and for me and for everyone who has ever leaned on him. The worth is him. Just him. The man himself, without his hands on any wheel, without his jaw set against any storm, standing in his own skin with nothing to offer except himself, and the offering would be enough, more than enough, because what is wanted here, what was always wanted, is not what he can do but who he is.
He does not know this yet. And the not-knowing is a grief I carry into the joy, a grief the joy carries inside itself, because the love that has received me wants him too, with the same fierce, specific, fitted wanting, and he will be harder to reach, my Reed, because the hands that hold the wheel so tightly do not easily let go. But the love is patient. The love waited twenty-one years for me. It will wait for him.
I release him again, more completely this time. I release him into the care of the One who loved him before I did, who put him in the kitchen at that party, who gave him the hands and the steadiness and the quiet, competent, managing heart, who made him for the same homecoming I am in now, and who will, in whatever time and in whatever way Reed’s particular heart requires, bring him here. I do not know the road. I do not need to know. I trust the driver. The driver is the One who brought me.
I think of Tara. My best friend, my first friend, the girl who forgave me before I confessed, whose mercy ran ahead of my repentance and covered the thing I did before I had the courage to name it. I think of her in the bathroom at the concert, laughing at her own reflection, adjusting her earring, saying something sharp and funny to the stranger at the next mirror. I think of the long walks and the late calls and the way she listens with her whole body, leaning in, her eyes narrow with attention, as if your words are a code she is determined to crack. I love her. The love is here, in this light, in this warmth, as real as it ever was, and the Presence holds it the way He holds everything, without diminishing it, without competing with it, simply receiving it into the larger love that made it possible.
I think of the seven of us. The word seven arrives in me like a number heard through a wall, indistinct but certain. I do not know why I think of it. I do not know who the seven are, not all of them, not by name. I know myself and I know Reed. But there were others. On the road, in the weather, in the moment when the noise was everything and then was nothing. There were others, and they are somewhere, and the same love that met me at the door is meeting them, in whatever form their particular hearts require, and the meeting is happening now, in whatever now means when time is a pool and not a river, and some of them will come quickly and some will take longer and the love will wait for all of them, because the waiting is not impatience, it is the patience of a love that has no deadline it did not set and no border it cannot cross.
The light deepens again. I did not think it could deepen further. I was wrong. There is more. There is always more. The more is not a quantity but a quality, a richness that increases the way a chord increases when a new note is added, not louder but fuller, not brighter but more complete, and the completeness is His, and the His is everything, and the everything is not overwhelming in the way I expected it to be, in the way that standing on the edge of a cliff is overwhelming, where the vastness makes you feel small and fragile and in danger of falling. The everything is overwhelming the way a mother’s arms are overwhelming to a child who has been crying a long time and is finally picked up: the vastness is safety, the hugeness is comfort, the endlessness is the assurance that the holding will not stop, that the arms will not tire, that the love is large enough to hold the grief and the joy and the reaching and the cruelty and the lie and the snap and the whole, failing, beautiful, particular twenty-one years of Lena without running out of room.
I am being completed. I can feel it the way you feel a song reaching its final measures, not with anxiety but with the gathering satisfaction of a shape being fulfilled, a pattern being realized, a promise being kept. Every unfinished thing in me is being finished. Not fixed, not corrected, not improved the way you improve a draft by cutting the bad sentences and strengthening the good ones. Completed. Made whole. The same Lena, with the same reaching heart and the same tendency toward cruelty when she is afraid and the same ache and the same love, but completed now, the way a key is completed when it finds the lock it was cut for and the mechanism turns and the door opens and the opening is the purpose the key was always made for.
The ache is gone. I say this and I need to say what I mean by it, because the saying is important and the meaning is exact. The ache is not gone the way pain is gone when the nerves are cut, leaving a numbness where the feeling was. The ache is gone the way hunger is gone after a meal, not erased but fulfilled, not silenced but answered, and the answer is so precisely the thing the hunger was for that the hunger, in retrospect, is revealed to have been the body’s knowing all along, the body’s reaching toward nourishment it could smell but not see, and the nourishment is here, and the eating is not eating but being, and the being is the fullest, most satisfied, most awake being I have ever experienced or imagined.
I am not reaching anymore. For the first time in my life, I am not reaching. The hands that were always extended toward the door that would not open are resting now, resting inside the place that was behind the door, resting in the warm, deep, held center of the love that was always on the other side, and the resting is not passivity but completion, not stillness but arrival, not the end of motion but the end of the need to move, because I am where I was going, and the where is Him, and He is everywhere, and everywhere is home.
I feel a joy I cannot describe. Every word I reach for shatters against it like a glass thrown at a wall. The joy is not happiness, though it contains happiness. It is not pleasure, though it is more pleasurable than anything I have ever felt. It is not relief, though the relief of the ache finally answered is so vast it would fill the sky if the sky were still a thing that existed in my world. The joy is the felt reality of being exactly where I belong, with exactly Whom I belong with, in a love that has no conditions and no borders and no expiration and no clause in the fine print that says except when you are cruel, except when you lie, except when you snap, except when you look away from the man on the bench. No exceptions. The love is the love. It was always the love. And I am in it.
I rest.
Not because I am tired. I have never been less tired. I rest because the resting is the right response to the arriving, the way sitting down is the right response to coming home after a long walk, not because the legs have failed but because the walking is done. The walking is done. The long, sweet, painful, bewildering walk that began on a summer morning in a kitchen full of sunlight and carried me through twenty-one years of aching and reaching and loving and failing and holding on and letting go, the walk is done, and I am sitting down, I am being sat down, in the warmest, deepest, safest seat there is, and the sitting is not the end of the story but the beginning of a story that does not end, and the not-ending is not frightening but joyful, because the story is His story, and His story is love, and love does not end.
Here is what I know, at the end of everything and the beginning of everything else.
I know that I was loved before I was born. I know that the ache was a gift, the most precise and personal gift I was ever given, because it was the thread that led me here, the homing signal that my whole self was tuned to without knowing it, and every time it fired, every time the beauty broke me open and the door appeared and the reaching began, I was being called, by name, by Someone who knew me better than I knew myself and loved me more than I could have stood to know while I was alive, because the knowing would have burned like fire and I was not yet ready for the burning.
I know that the burning is not burning. Here, in the fullness, in the center, in the deep and holy and personal and warm and overwhelming love that is the Presence and the face and the yes and the home, the burning is not burning. It is being held. It is being known. It is being wanted with a wanting so vast and so specific that it fills every crack in me, every failure, every cruelty, every lie, every reaching that fell short, and the filling is not a covering-over but a completing, a making-whole, a love that takes the worst of me and the best of me and says, to all of it, mine.
Mine. The word is His. Not possessive. Not the mine of a fist closed around a thing it will not release. The mine of a voice calling across a field to a child who has wandered too far: come back, you are mine, you have always been mine, the wandering does not change it, the distance does not diminish it, the field is inside my hand and the hand is open and the open hand is home.
I am home.
The first of the seven. I do not know how I know this. But I know it the way I knew the face, the way I knew the ache, the way I knew the yes before I spoke it: with a knowing that arrives before the thought and does not need the thought to confirm it. I am the first, and the others are coming, each in their own time, each along their own road, each through whatever doors the love will need to open or break down or wait beside, and the love will wait, because the love is patient, and the patience is not a strategy but a nature, and the nature is His, and His nature is the love itself.
The light holds me. I let it. I have let it since the moment the noise stopped and the silence came and the warmth began, and the letting is not surrender anymore, it is participation, it is the glad, free, unhesitating joining of a love that was always mine and that I am, at last, claiming as mine, the way you claim a name you have always had but never heard spoken aloud until the One who gave it to you speaks it, and the speaking is the knowing, and the knowing is the love, and the love is the home, and the home is Him.
Him. The face. The warmth. The light. The yes.
This is where I am. This is who I am with. This is the end of the reaching and the beginning of the having, and the having does not end.
I rest in it. I remain in it. I begin in it.
Home.