Perfect love...

I can hear it ticking away now - yes... aha...'drives out fear'? Fear, love... opposites... incompatible? Wait a minute. Isn't fear part of the strongest sort of love? Isn't light only light because of the darkness? Aren't corners only sharp because of the straight lines, and, and, and... all the other neat, packaged clichés about Life.

"Don't talk to me about Life. I've seen it." It's got lots of strange bits in, but it's far from 'rubbish'. Memories. Threads running back through the mind, but only having any essence at all because of the edges on which they snag, twist, turn what was simply "now" into "I'd never have guessed at the time, but looking back it all makes so much more sense". Even "aggggh!" into "hmmm... that's certainly worth remembering...". So is there any use then for fear? If all the nows become thens, with inconceivable value, could not one suppose that fear never should be, well... feared? Not so much on a level of anything actually changing whether or not one gets scared, but simply whether one should.

But the biggest love that I can know, is only like that because of the fear that God has let me see. The only way I can look at a diagram of two perpendicular lines and see love, is that God has let me look towards myself, and to see the fear inside. The crumpled fist of hidden helplessness. The hurt pride that laughs itself off, but then burrows down to grow new claws. The selfishness that gives away the last sweet, to grab hungrily at the piousness of its own sacrifice. If I had no fear of that, I should not spin around, eyes sprinting across the reaches of what I can understand, seeking some real way to rid myself of it. I would not plead with God, for him to come up with some real answer to it. Surely he could, surely he'd be able to? Even though it must be impossible for him... for he knows. He knows what it's like in there. He knows it doesn't get any better when I forget it. He knows I haven't seen even the half of it.

Finished! Achieved! Accomplished! That's what he said. That's what he cried out, knowing, like no-one else ever will, what it truly meant. That he could somehow fold up inside himself all of the whole of which he'd turned my eyes to see only a part. Not just with a barge-pole, not with sterile gloves afraid to touch and a face mask preventing him breathing it in. Not with tinted glasses seeing less and tweezers feeling little, but with both arms held wide open and with his heart still beating with light. He reaches out his crushing hand, strong, undaunted but with the softest contact. Takes the crumpled fist, the molten ashes from my own and holds them to his chest. How that pumping light could touch this, my weak antithesis of his firm innocence? But hold it he does, and catch my eye. Could there ever be an eye I could not catch, but his? Yet without sound or motion he simply says

"it's going down with me. I'll see you in the morning..."



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