Wrap the Night Around Me

Come with me on a little journey to the possible present and my certain past.

Love, according to U2, is blindness. Anyone swimming in the darkness of their own pungent reality—love wasted, withered, done and dusted; not less gone—will know a thousand shrieking images of pain, drenched with indelibly salient tears.

I can genuinely write this—years after the fact—with a sense of tragically blissful nostalgia so captivating it is difficult to describe. But it’s thoroughly alluring.

Taken deep then, we find offensive this life that has squashed us between the cushion and a harder lounge chair—starved of oxygen to safely breathe. We don’t, however, have the energy for complaint right now. Life is dire; love has taken us into blindness; a reality hardly real, yet somehow never realer.

It’s funny, after the event—years after—there’s almost nothing better, considering how it was and how much I learned about myself and how much I experienced God.

The candle is blown clean out. There’s not an ignition source in sight and no hope of light at a time when we could barely consider living without it. Screeching agony overwhelms us right now and no one understands; no one!

Years after first knowing a time when life could not perceptibly get any harder I reflect over the One who continually chased me down; suckling to him, I didn’t at the time—at times—recognise, he was there! I was not alone.

Wrap the night around me. Suffocate and squeeze harder; no, harder still... please. I don’t want to wake from this. It’s just easier that way.

This is not darkness.

Flipped over upon itself, it was the fastest trip to light. Indeed, it was the only true way. People will grapple for a true and communally-harmonious sense of spirituality and they never do usually find it unless they find it this way. Call it a paradox of salvation.

What on Earth is this all about?

The true sense of life is this. We can only really know life in the light of what we learn about it.

The hardest and darkest trip—the trip to the abundant life—is the trip, ironically, to ourselves—if we’ll only let it occur that way.

The hardest thing possibly is how we must stand by and watch others we love go through this sort of torment. It’s made easier to do this when we’ve been there ourselves; but it’s never easy.

What a life we have that we can have known such dark despair, and yet now, all is never better and we can go from strength to strength.

This is the second chance of life we scarcely hoped for, but is now real.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.