Chapter 4 - Movement

“And remember when I moved in you,

the holy dove was moving too,

and every breath we drew was hallelujah.”

            Delilah was alive. That’s why he stayed with her. As he was fading away she seemed solid: solid enough to pull him back to reality. Her hips swung and her voice twanged: even in the morning. He soaked her in. Soaked in her life. She was over animated and put on an air of apathy that made him feel comfortable sitting and existing and slowly pulling himself back together from the recesses where he had been flung. She let him do that. And she nursed the life back into him simply by being.

            So he began to live too. Felt responsibility and empathy slowly burn their way back into his blood stream. He began to make dinner for her when she came home. He cleaned her apartment, fed the cat, and once he went out to get groceries in the evening without telling her and she beat him home. He came through the door and caught her standing silently in the middle of her bedroom. They looked at each other and her face was grave. He held up the grocery bags.

            “Just went to restock.” He said and stepped out of her line of sight into the kitchen. It happened so gradually that neither of them knew until it was too late. The sharing of life, the accepting of wrongs, the comfort of existing with another human being. She was all woman with him, and he was all man. He knew how she walked, how she showered, how she smoked, and how she laughed. He knew what made her grin, what pissed her off, and what she was willing to ignore.

            So he forgave her when she turned on him.

Chapter 5 - I Have To Go

“I have to go, I have to go. Your hair was long when we first met.”

            How do we get to these places? How do we get stuck between a rock and a hard place? You think back on the decisions that brought you to this point and you trace your steps back one by one. Didn’t want to go to college, worked at a coffee shop, upgraded to a bar at twenty-one, started taking online classes, bought a cat, learned to cook, bought a bus pass.

            You go to leave work like any other day and you’re not thinking about what happens outside your country: about world issues, and the big picture. The things that you read in the news and watch on TV seem very far away: like a fantasy. The terrorist and religious crusader in the paper? He makes you feel a stricter loyalty to your country, and if there was something you could do then of course you would do it, but a plan of attack doesn’t often cross your mind. What you’re really thinking about is what recipe you’re going to try to make tonight, if the litter box needs to be changed and what pocket you’ve left your keys in. Then one day you close up from work and a regular walks up to you and tells you they need you to go above and beyond.

            Samson had seemed like a fantasy and now she knew why: he was the man in the paper and on the news. He had told her that his God had given him unnatural strength, and she had brushed it off when he told her there was something he must never do in order to keep it. But now she believed him, and she would find out how to stop him.

            How do we wrestle our way out of these places? With silence. With blank eyes and a blank mind. With deep breaths that shake loose the truth from where every defense mechanism has been holding it down. With a cigarette. With anger, no answer, it’s not true, I never loved him anyway. I can’t do this. With tears that won’t come and a cold resolve. With much waiting. How could he? I know what I need to do. I will do what must be done. I am the kind of person that can do what must be done.


*

            She stood outside her apartment door. The smell of breakfast was wafting past its edges and she could not move—until finally she could and she unlocked the door and walked in. Samson stood in the kitchen in her apron cooking a late night breakfast and sneaking pieces of bacon to her cat crouched on the counter. She could not smile. Oh God, she couldn’t smile. He turned to her.

            “Hey sweetie.” She smiled. She walked to him and looked between him and the cat. He gave her the bacon and she walked to the dining room table.

            She had never planned on staying with him forever anyway.

Chapter 6 - Humility

“And the lords of the Philistines came up to her and said to her,

"Seduce him, and see where his great strength lies,

and by what means we may overpower him,

that we may bind him to humble him.”

Judges 16:5

           

            He knew when she discovered who he was.

            He awoke one night and saw her, a silhouette of black against dark blue light, sitting cross-legged and slouched on the small round table by the window in their bedroom. She had it propped open and she breathed smoke silently through the screen cover between long slow swallows of alcohol. She was wearing her knee length bathrobe and her hand, with both cigarette and bottle, rested on her right knee. Long before he watched her casually slide her free hand across her cheek and wipe it on her robe, he knew.

           

            So he forgave her when she turned on him.

            He forgave her forceful attitude and conniving questions. He forgave her standing up for her country instead of him. He forgave her feelings of betrayal and anger, because he was angry too. Angry that he let himself go where he was certain he had never wanted to go again. But people never mean to stumble back into old habits and mostly they can’t help it, because it’s the human thing to do.

            And when he had played the game long enough, he told her. He told her the secret to his strength, this time for real, no more false leads and lies. He made it easy for her. He walked right into her trap and her plan, because he was too tired to pretend anymore:

Chapter 7 - Kitchen Chair

“She tied you to a kitchen chair,

she broke your thrown and she cut your hair,

and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”

             Their eyes locked. This is the moment where the heart breaks. This is the moment where honesty equals love, and we do what we do with naked abandon, because we’re caught. We’re caught as we fall and we’re seen for what we are, and no amount of righteous judgment can stop us from being naked in the face of the unconditional. So she squeezed her fingers together and felt the dull scissors cut a lock of his hair and heard the silent slide of it gracing the floor. He felt his strength ebb away, and his chance for vengeance slide away with it.

            There was no breath. There was no movement. She looked into his calm and knowing eyes and the scissors slid from her fingers, their rust covered blades clamored on the floor, and he leaned forward against the ropes and kissed her.

            In the end she let him go, but he did not run. He took a slice of Wonderbread from the cupboard and picked up the dull scissors from the kitchen floor. He munched lazily on his snack as he placed the scissors nearby her on the nightstand, and fell asleep in her lap where she silently finished the job. The next morning stayed lazy, she went to work as usual in the evening, and when she came home he was gone. They had taken him as planned: a white envelope with money and a note remained as proof.

            But even for weeks afterward, her victory never tasted sweet.  

Chapter 8 - Wrong

“And even though it all went wrong,

stand before the Lord of Song,

with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah”

            She knew where they would take him and she could not let his shame be her glory. She had done what she needed to do for her country, now she would do what had to be done for his God: His good had eaten her down to skin and bones and she knew how to make it right. So bribing and winking her way through the hoops, she made arrangements for getting to him.

            When she saw him, she felt her limbs turn to ice and she could not catch her breath. She had not anticipated what they would do to him once they had him. Emaciated and eyeless, he was strung up between two columns in the basement of the federal building, and through nausea and shame, she noted with satisfaction, the thin brown hair that was peeking up through his scalp. It was all the incentive she needed. No one would ever know how she had placed his hands on the foundations of the building, or how her hands on his are what gave her away.

            She did not run to him in the last moments and throw her arms around him as the building fell. He did not tell her that he forgave her. He did not tell her to leave and save herself. She did not tell him that she was sorry and that she really did love him. There were no words between them when he brought the columns down. There were no words that could fix what had been done. He was finishing what he had started, and she was paying for her crimes. And they knew that. And somewhere far away, the God that watched it all knew it too. And it was credited to him as a cold and broken, hallelujah. 

Coping

 "I felt the Lord begin, to peel off all my skin."

original by Grace Adams

words by Manchester Orchestra

Lightweight

Today I’m not a nurse.

Today, I’m not a runner.

Today I’m not a housemate,

I’m not a grown up,

I’m not a gardener.

Today I’ve never been in love.

And today I’ve never broken a bone,

or been confused,

or put myself second.

Today I have nowhere to be.

I have nowhere I’ve gone.

I have nowhere I’m going.

Today I am a very young girl.

And being alone in silence,

With the beginnings of a fading sun outside my bay window,

Seems simple, not lonely.

Seems fresh, not sour.

Today I have nothing on my agenda:

just to be.

4am.

Nothing is good enough:

Not at 4am.

Not when you’re tuning yourself off in favor of getting it done.

Not when the insurmountable tomorrow is what you know you’ll wake up to.

Nothing is good enough:

Not my body,

Not my brains,

Not my spirit,

Not my past,

My wits

My humor

My quality.

Nothing is good enough.

Not even you, anymore.

Not even sleep, at 4am, is good enough.

So as I lay me down to sleep,

I’ll hate you

Like I hate me

And I’ll hate every moment until I’m unconscious.

And when the alarm tears me awake in the morning,

I’ll realize that 4am is a very unholy place to be.

Dreams

         She awoke in the morning with the vague feeling of adventure and heartache. She rolled onto her stomach and breathed in heavily, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes and subsequently letting them slide through her hair. It was a clumsy attempt to remove it from her face, but her fingers caught in the tangles and she brushed it aside as the beginnings of one large dread. She slid her bare feet over the edge of her bed, and their impact with the cold hard floor brought her mostly back to life. She plodded off to the shower, robe in hand.
         The water ran over her shoulders and it wasn’t until it started to turn icy that she realized how long she’d been standing there. Something felt thick around her. She felt as though there was a heavy fog in her mind. She thought hard. There was something on the edge of her memory.
         She slipped her purple sweater over her shoulders and as she began to slide the last button into place at her neck, she looked at its reflection in the mirror. She stopped and stared at it. Something was just barely eluding her. She rolled the button between her fingers for a moment, trying to make the fog lift. There was something she had dreamed. Something that she didn’t want to forget.
         She took her toast out of the toaster, buttered it, set it on the table, took a mug from the cupboard , poured herself coffee, began to spoon in sugar—a flash—she set the mug down abruptly. It spilled light brown on the kitchen counter. She was sure of it. There was something she had forgotten. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and thought hard. Fleeting memories left their quick impressions upon her mind, but she couldn’t grasp it: not anything concrete.
         She spent a moment staring at the jar of sugar then drank her coffee and ate her toast quickly before climbing in her car to drive to work. She stayed in the office from eight to five and then went home. She fed her dog. She made dinner. She went for a walk. That week she got promoted. The next month she bought a house. The next year she completed her garden. She worked and cooked and gardened and walked her dog and she forgot. She forgot that there was a time in which she had a dream. 


*


         She had dreamed one night that she had not put work first. That she had not gone straight home every evening. She dreamed that she had indulged in life and bought into its loveliness. That she never got promoted or bought a house. She dreamed that her heart and door were always open and that she had laughed at the consequences. That a shiny piece of jewelry had been placed on her left hand.
         She dreamed that she had not lived life alone.
         And as the early morning beams had wrapped themselves around her and began to pull her back to reality, she clung to her dream. She clung to the memories of laughter ringing across a lake, burning dinners, and late bills. She basked in the glory of inside jokes, themed gifts, and discrete communication. She seared into her memory what it was like to never laugh or scream alone, to have a human being as your right arm, to be one flesh.
         They both knew she was slipping away and they both knew their glory days were coming to an end, and as the memories of a life lived began to blur into early morning light, she held onto him and told herself: “Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget. It was all worth remembering. Don’t forget! Don’t forget there was something worth remembering!”


*


She awoke in the morning with the vague feeling of adventure and heartache. But there is a reason ideals are called dreams, and life, reality.