An Emotion of Great Delight

I looked up then, searched the sky.

When I found the moon I found God, when I saw the stars
I saw God, when I let myself be inhaled by the vast, expanding universe, I understood God the way Seneca once did—God is everything one sees and everything one does not see.

I’d tried for months to keep everything inside, to say nothing, speak to no one, soldier through. For nearly a year I’d held my breath, stitched closed my lips, devoured myself until I could not manage another bite. I’d not known the limits of my own body at the onset, had not known how long it would take to digest pain, had not realized I might not be able to contain it or that it might continue to multiply

I grieved quietly—in the privacy of my bedroom, on the shower floor, in the middle of the night. I’d learned from my mother to hide the pain that mattered most, to allow it an audience only behind closed doors, with only God as my witness.

By the time I turned seventeen I’d definitively shed the wild awkwardness expected of most teenagers my age. This was right around the time my mother would not stop crying, around the time I’d lie awake in bed and pray to God to kill my father. I stopped laughing so loudly, stopped running around so recklessly, stopped smiling, generally.

I had aged.

People thought I was growing up, and perhaps I was,
perhaps this was growing up—this, this, an uncertain spiral into a darkness lined with teeth

I was becoming familiar with this feeling, these wings beating in my chest, this desperate acceleration of emotion. I couldn’t breathe around it, couldn’t see around it, couldn’t have imagined my heart could fissure and fuse, fissure and fuse on into infinity.

“I still love you,” he whispered. “I still love you and I don’t know how to stop.”

I felt something snap inside of me, felt something sever. I stared at him with a trembling hope. My soggy mind didn’t know what it was doing. My own name pressed against my tongue.

Shadi meant joy, and all I ever did was cry.

I felt a key click into the clockwork of my heart then, felt a terrifying turning in my chest that promised to keep me going, to buy me more time in this searing life. I felt it, felt my body restart with a climbing, aching fear. I feared that something was changing, that maybe I was changing, that my entire life was shedding a skin it had outgrown at last, at last.

It scared me.

I didn’t know how to handle the shape of hope. I didn’t know how such a thing might fit in my body. I was so afraid, so afraid of being disappointed.

Until tonight I’d never even considered we might be happy again; I’d never dreamed we might use the broken pieces of our old life to build something new. I’d thought, for so long, that this pain I clenched every day in my fist would be my sole possession, all I ever carried for the rest of my life.

They probably knew I was up to no good even now, but perhaps they’d also seen something in my face, understood how I might be feeling, that I needed to leave. Run for my life.