Tag: secret places

Sacred spaces

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts2 Comments

Churches make me nervous. I never feel like I belong in them. Still. I measure my decisions with the likelihood of future regret. This, I know, I will regret not doing.

***

There’s a small courtyard between the office building and the church, inside the church gate. There are always a few drifter sitting on the benches or the steps leading up to the side door of the sanctuary. The office is in the back. I take a deep breath, push the door open, walk in.

The girl in the office has short fuchsia hair and a permanent scowl.

“Is your labyrinth open?” I ask.

She looks me up and down, taking in the business casual. “There’s a Muslim congregation worshipping,” she says. “If they’re finished, you can go in.” I’ve no idea why you’d want to, lingers, unspoken.

The main doors to the sanctuary stand open. A few men are clustered outside, telling each other goodbye. I drift up the steps, hesitating at the inner doors. A few more men sit on the pews in the sanctuary proper. Someone stands at the edge of the dais, rolling up a large mat.

I don’t see what I have come here for, but there’s nowhere else it could be. I consider turning around, going back to the office. I don’t belong here. This is not my church.

Still. Setting my hand on the brass handle, I close my eyes and open the door.

The men inside talk back and forth, neither ignoring not acknowledging me. I make my way up the aisle, eyes on the floor in front of me.

Pass-a-grille ids white paint on concrete pavers. Grace Cathedral is metal set into stone. This is a hardwood floor, polyurethane shiny, the path laid down on top like a vinyl sticker. Behind me, the men continue to talk. I’m not sure if they’re speaking English. I’m not sure if they’re entirely with it. I step into the labyrinth.

***

Breathe in, breathe out, I tell myself. Focus on your breath. Focus on your feet.

I’m here because there are decisions I don’t know how to make. Things that don’t lend themselves to a neat table of pro and con.

One foot and then the other. It’s an easy path to walk, wide enough to contain me, narrow enough to keep my focus. Breathe in, breathe out. Some of the men leave, some stay. The conversation is softer now. Nobody pays any attention to me.

I’m not expecting answers. I’m not expecting anything, really. Still. I walk more slowly as I wind closer to the center. What do you want most? I ask myself, thinking I am asking a question about my job, about where I live, about how I want my marriage to be.

The voice that answers doesn’t care about any of these things. I want to write, it says, as I find the center of the labyrinth. One hour or one thousand words, I promise myself.

I am light, I am breath, I am air. I no longer feel like an outsider in this space.
***

I know I will fail. I know some days it will be too much. I hope that when I am tired and telling myself there’s no point, I will remember the way I feel right now, the surety certainty solidity.

***

I walk out the same way I came in, following the path laid onto the floor, the subtle curves, the long sweeps. The men have left, all but one who sits reading a paper in the middle of an otherwise empty pew.

I walk out the same way I came in, eyes on the floor in front of me, feet infinitely lighter.

“It’s cool that you let lovely lily read the letter”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings4 Comments

The summer I was sixteen, my best friend and I wrote letters to each other.  We used pink pens and glittering ink, decorating the outside of the envelopes with song lyrics.  We made up names for ourselves and everyone around us, a secret, sacred world we could slip into at will.  Lost boys wandered through our pages, disappearing for days on end, sometimes forgotten, sometimes rediscovered, always beautiful.  It was a magical correspondence.  When I read the letters now I am still imbued with a sense of the infinite, even though it is clear from a distance how quickly we were beginning to unravel.

I am not, it seems, the only one who misses writing letters.  Mary Robinette Kowal has issued a challenge:  during the month of February, write one letter every day the post office is open.

I have decided to do this thing.  I will write to the people I have left scattered across the places I have been.  I will write to the people who post addresses and invite mail from perfect strangers.

And, if you wish it, I will write to you.  Send me your address (at my email or via direct message to @thegirlhaswings).  I’ll cast my mind back to the where and the when of how we knew each other, and I’ll put down on paper those things I always thought I should have said to you but never did.  You don’t have to write back, but I do ask, in the spirit of hand-written correspondence, that my letters stay offline.

I don’t want to post my address online, for all the obvious sorts of reasons, but if you’d like to write me a letter, send an email or a tweet.

Questions and such welcomed.

love is a dangerous angel

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

This was going to be the post about going to meet the husband’s friends from work at the Gramercy and why I love the secret places inside restaurants and hotels.  Not to mention that I still owe you my take on the Baker’s Dozen auction and the fate of my novel.  It’ll have to wait.

I left work early tonight and slipped downstairs to the Barnes and Noble, where I did something I haven’t done in a long time.  I grabbed a book off the shelf and read it.  The whole thing, all of it, at once, in about two hours.

I used to do this fairly often – I’d devour a new novel in an afternoon, or I’d go into Half-Price while I was waiting for my husband to get off work and find myself most of the way through a book by the time they turned the lights off and kicked me out.  I haven’t done it in a while, though, not like this.  Reading this book was like a mad, desperate, frantic grasping that left me battered.  Stunned.

There are two things you should know before you start thinking you wished you could go through an entire book in a few hours.  The first is that you miss things.  I don’t mind this, so much.  It means that each time I read a book there are new details for me to find.  It makes each reading new.  The second thing is that my brain works differently when I read like that.  It’s so busy processing information that everything else stops.  Time compresses in on itself, like I’m going through life at 1.5 speed, so that my sense of time is rendered meaningless.  My focus narrows in to what I am reading and only what I am reading.  I don’t hear the conversations around me, the Christmas music blasting from the speaker above my head.  I exist between one turn of the page and the next.

When it is over, when I have turned the last page and closed the cover,   I feel as though I’m on some sort of drunk.  I struggle to make sense of the real world – the stairs down to the subway, the traffic lights on the walk home.  It seems far away from what I’ve read – unconnected.  In the end, I’m left with a new room in the back of my head, as though someone emptied out a week’s worth of memories into me while I was sleeping.

The book, by the way, was Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall.  I highly recommend it.