We steal up the steps and into the church, the doors swinging lazily, refusing to close. I'm confident no one saw, but she's convinced. I don't know if the shadows here are deep enough for her to hide, to feel safe, but if not here, then where? This is supposed to be some kind of sanctuary, but I can't tell if those eyes are looking down on us with pity or accusation. Hundreds of eyes in hundreds of faces, staring down from pedestals and windows, not so different, as it turns out, from the very same eyes and stares that drove us in here, into the dark.
She's breathing hard, a knife edge on each quick gasp. She won't look at me, and I know why. I leave her to her thoughts and walk deeper into the church. My hand hovers over the holy water font, miming the forgotten gesture with a mind all its own. I look into the yawning dark and see no one, no one to cast us out, to see us for what we may be, to hold up that mirror that we've worked so hard to convince ourselves is distorted, twisted. It seems we may find peace here after all.
The door slams in its frame, knocking itself open again, the resonating boom echoing through the church, repeated a thousand times, the voice of judgement, perhaps. But the sound diminishes, and disappears. This place holds no terrors for us, no great unknown. We'll be safe here if only because it's empty.
I draw her deeper into the church, slowed to her stilted pace, and keep my arm around her. When she does look up, her face is streaked with tears. It was before, too, and my response, my rage, is to blame for our flight, our need to run and hide and not be seen. Her tears have always had that effect on me and I have never seen it as something that needs to be controlled or tempered. If she does she's never said so. Something leads me to believe it's a welcome response, proof somehow that the world still makes some sort of broken sense. And if she needs that from me, if I can provide some bent compass rose to her, then all the better. I'm happy to do it.
But this time her tears weaken me, and I hold her tight. I don't know quite how to do this, but I try and find that she seems to approve of the results, though I feel awkward and weak, uncomfortable and embarrassed. It's stupid of me, and I know it, but there's nothing for me to destroy here, nothing to break in order to fix her, so I have to do my best in unfamiliar territory. There's a weakness in her that I love, that I find myself protecting like a flame, holding it gently, against everything else there is that seems to want to crush it. Sometimes I'm able to open my hands and let it go, to let it soar and wheel through the air, reveling in a beauty I can't detect or fathom. When it flies high enough to leave me behind I'm left with traces, dust on my fingers from a moth's wings, sitting silent on the edge of the bed, paint peeling around me.
But it crashes to earth, it always does. The gravity of this place is just too much to escape, no matter how light your soul is, how overwhelming your need to be free. So I rush back to protect it, to put it back together and let it heal and forget.
Her breathing is even now, and slow, punctuated by the sniffles of a child. I know she didn't want to come here, but where else was there to go? Soon she'll lean against me and we'll make this place our own. Her eyes will close and I'll lie beside her.
1 August 2012
