Make it permanent

I want the words to sear across the page, to see the smoke rise from my pen from the way it blurs across the page.

I want to put those fiery words on paper, watch them smolder and smoke and burn for you, so that you may know you are loved and we are all cheering for you.

For every time I see your face, my heart comes just a little more alive, becomes just a little more human.

I want to tell you you will be stronger than you ever dared to be, even when you run across ghosts that you once knew right there in the ballroom. You’ll move around each other like two shadows running from the sun, running from the love that scarred a heart or two and made your momma cry. Made you cry. You’ll be more upset than you know, thinking the past stayed there, forgetting you carry its little footprints somewhere on the ceiling of broken dreams.

Those dreams, you’ll think you left them there on the floor, to shine occasionally when the rain runs out and there’s nothing left to see but a trail of torn up sheets, stitched together with every good intention and bad decision you hated to make.

You’ll look out into the future and new wind tears across the plains, tears across the skin. Suddenly, the breeze cools and you find yourself amidst the muddy water. Water made clean, water the color of blood. You forgot you were made new when you held your breath, breathed in water like holiness.

And some days you look into the future and all you see is the fuzzy outline of indistinct colors, colors you thought were vivid and made new each morning. And some days you look into the future and it just about spraypaints gold onto the neurons desperately seeking substance.

You forget how to breathe because you can’t run. You’re an idiot and they still love you. There’s something of your soul in your eyes, waiting for you to stop being an idiot, to stop thinking about breathing and to just do whatever the hell it is that comes natural to you. Like blinking.

Leaves spin into coffee cups, spin into mossy bricks, spin into fall, winter, spring, summer.

There never was a “you” in all those moments of medals and false smiles and craggy rocks; none of those things were “you”. You always dwelled in the heart of the Lord. Nothing else ever can, never will make you “you”.

So instead, wash your hair in holy water. Take in beautiful humility like oxygen. Swallow it clear down into the clear pools of your lungs. Be still, my heart, my beating heart. Rock to the rhythm of bass beats, from a God who likes to laugh. Prepare for rain. Walk through wooden fences and crash into the Comforter.

And when you write, use pen, not lead. Make it permanent.