sore spot

I don't know where you are.  And sometimes I am overwhelmed, looking through the crowd, hoping I'll recognize your face.  Hear your name.  Meet your gaze.

Deepest parts of me know you are here.  Walking, breathing, laughing, learning.

I wonder what it is you're doing.  Where it is you're being kept.  The story you're telling with your life that will, one day, dovetail with my own.

Because the deepest parts of me know it will.  These stories.  I know they'll intertwine.

Even now I smile, knowing perhaps the intertwining has already begun.  In the most obscure, unannounced ways.

A quiet prayer of mine is I will not have to be the one to call your name.  I will not have to be the one to vey for your attention.  I will not have to, on any level, convince you of my worth.  One day I will walk through the door and you will look up.

And you will see me.  For who I am.

Yours.

I used to close my eyes and imagine you.  At the end of an aisle.  Arms folded.  Waiting.

Your very self was blurry.  But I would project others into your space and they would waver and flicker, unable to fill the void.  No one fit.  No one fits.

Years have passed since this first vision.  And I even forget about the vision itself sometimes.  I forget the vision was a promise, a foreshadowing.  On overcast days, I disregard it as a wishful thought.  A false hope.

I also used to know what I wanted you to be like.  I thought I was sure.  Then life happened.  In all it's fury and all its pain and all its change.  And I wasn't sure anymore.  

I changed.  The woman walking towards you.  I transformed before my very eyes.  Burned to ashes and rebuilt.  Shredded by the wind and reconstructed.  Narrow shoulders walking towards you carried a weight and began to strengthen.

In my ear, words are whispered.  Be, not look.  Become, not find.

So I've been becoming.  Inefficiently.  Poorly.  Haphazardly.  Chaotically.  But still...  I am not the same as I was the first time those words sunk into my heart.  I know what they mean now.

I envision myself now, walking towards you, carrying it all.  The mistakes, the burdens, the dreams, the passions.  Explanations sit heavy on my tongue and desperate hope hovers behind my ears.  You will love me, won't you?  Me and this patchwork story I've written.

The evolution of your image in my mind only comes to the forefront when my heart is tired.  When disappointment cracks and reality becomes hard to swallow.  When my defenses are weakened so the oldest, consuming dreams can surface.

The constant is that I have always known you weren't here.  Not in this place.  Not on the streets I roam.

But I haven't been allowed to leave yet.  Regardless, I could never bring myself to leave just to find you.  You need a whole.  Not a part.  And until recently... so many parts were missing.  So much was missing from me I couldn't have carried myself to you if I'd tried.

Particularly the part of me that would have thought I'd be worthy of you.

Any day before this one, you would have met a woman who couldn't even fathom her worth.  Who feared the mirror and despised her voice and groaned with empty arms.

Cold is coming.  Cold seeps into the seams of my bones and illuminates the parts of me, hurt.  Then I think of you.  Not because of the pain but because of your absence.  Though strangely present.  As if I already know your voice by heart.  Which is why my ear is tuned to hear it.

But I haven't heard it yet.  Your voice say my name.  I know this.  As surely as I can.

This already, this not yet.

I almost gave up on you.  Please forgive me.  

I pretended not to believe, to the very extent I convinced myself.  I persuaded myself into thinking you were not real.  That you were not promised.  That this image forming behind my eyes of you -- big, dark, gentle, smiling -- was a figment of my most betraying imagination.

But in this whole heart, finally whole, beating behind my bones, there is this spot.

This sore spot where you belong.

Not a hole you will fill.  Not a void you will consume.

But a spot, sore from the waiting.  Tender from the hoping.  

There is a sore spot in my heart where you belong.

~

After all these years, I feel a gentle unloosing.

I stare around myself, bewildered.  At the ends untied.

A quiet beckoning draws me to a new place.  Laced with permission.  Subtle in its approval.

I stand planted, suddenly afraid.

Paralyzed by this allowance, never before offered to me.

I crane my ear towards the first Voice, far more familiar than even yours.  You know His voice too.

The same Voice whispering to you to wait for me.  However vague.

He is cupping my heart in callused hands.  Breathing something, akin to resilience, into my veins.

I resist.  Knowing full well what this strange gesture is.  Remembrance.

But I had forgotten about you.  Buried you deep.

Until just now.

Until just this morning as the same Breath poured over me as the sun rose and He gently touched the seal.

I miss you.

Save a place for me at your table.

~

My prayer is you will call my name.  You will walk into my line of vision, in a noble effort to win my attention.  A quiet, desperate prayer that you will know what I am worth.  To you.  To the world.  To our Father.  That when you look up and see me, we will know.

And that I will fit under your arm.  On your finger.

That I will be a healing balm to a sore spot in your own heart.

In the becoming, this day will come.