God is a place

I love y'all

This is a little section of a novel I’m working on, you know the drill. :)

Been feeling this passage so hard lately. Been crying so much about the plight of humanity. Been crying about how most people are innocent, and yet we have all been wounded so deeply by others. There is just so much in the world! so much joy, so much suffering. Sometimes I just am so….. amazed/devastated by it.

I can’t believe we are doing this!!!! that we keep doing this, living life day-in and day-out.

I love y’all fr. I love humanity! I love us so bad and that’s why it really hurts. For better or worse we are in it together. I’m just praying and crying and praying and crying.

-Thai x

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It was December. The world was cold and preserved. Mina felt so happy to be living in her parents house with her grandparents in the basement, writing her novel. She had around 90,000 words and the faith that she would find something at the end. She loved the grey sky and the skeletal trees. As she was walking, there was some quality of the cold breeze that made her reflect on winters before; how desperate and sad those winters felt. But now, she had the strangest feeling of comfort because she could see that even then she felt a glimmer of this ineffable feeling.

She remembers walking to her residence after watching a movie alone in the basement of the strip mall, flakes falling out of the sky in fat wet chunks. The snow on the ground was fresh, pearl white. She stood under the street lamp, it was glowing a soft orange, and she watched the snow flakes emerge out of some darkness. They glistened dazzlingly in the halo of light, and then swiftly fell into darkness again. How mysterious the world felt that night. The winter was special even then in her lonely first year of university. Yes, even the terrible parts felt notable now; her ears aching with a throbbing dull pain. The sobering feeling of walking out of a club or a bar and the way the cold would smack you over the head, propelling you violently into the body.

Even in the winters that she would inevitably end up labelling sad and crushing there was still a strange magic, a dusting of eternity. And maybe memories shined differently in different lights, not because memories were faulty and we, humans, were fallible, but because God was a place.

…

On the way to the movie theatre to watch a sequel from a popular franchise, Mina wept in the car, wailing and trembling while Es, who was driving, glanced over at her concerned. Mina did not know how to explain what was taking place, how overwhelming and joyous it was to see everything so clearly. God was a place. Was this place heaven? It did not matter. The world was not anymore special or less. The world was how it always was, complete with infinite things, infinite processes, but these infinite things were not God. Somewhere above that wretched mundanity or rather in it, there was a place that you could visit where time expanded, not just backward and forward, but laterally, exposing the raw nerve of life.

She received subtle strange intimations of the immense multitude of things in the music that was playing out of the car stereo. The sombre, but pressing guitar, the singer pushing the song along almost in spite of himself, soldiering on with pain-staking duty, and Mina was there with them, in some basement, at some party, looking up at the ceiling, asking, why? She was everyone. She was the whole party and she could not think of anything else to say, but why?

Why go through this whole theatre of life: the ups the downs, the brutality of even the smallest of sufferings, much less big, inconceivable sufferings? Why write, and make art and speak, when it seemed that all the important things could not be expressed, could not be spoken out loud?

Another song started playing, it drummed in with many voices all singing in harmony, the delightful trill of the multitude carrying one melody; how ecstatic it was, and then how quickly it fell into dissonance, crumbling and breaking apart. How desperate Mina felt to get back to it, to that harmony that once was. She wept desperately then for everything that was lost. How fractured she felt the world was in that brief minute. And then the chorus, the harmony, it returned with gusto and exhalation, and then, she wept tears of joy. There it was again, the beautiful thrumming on of humanity.

God was always destined to forsake us, Mina thought. And she understood Jesus there on the cross, pleading with God, abandoned by God. Because the truth was most people were utterly innocent in their petty trivialities, their narcissism, their careless disregard of others. How often had she looked at a cashier and had not seen a soul. It was all too easy to leave that place that was God, almost as if it was designed to be that way.

And how stupidly simple the return was.

She recalled a month ago, in New York. She was riding the subway and was suddenly overwhelmed by the profound specialness of everyone. Mina was amazed that she had not noticed it before. It felt like the most obvious thing in the world, so completely undeniable. Everyone had a unique face, a unique body, a spirit contained within it, a presence. A latino man noticed her smiling goofily out at the subway car and he smiled at her, kindly, but quizzically, shifting his lunch box from his left hand to his right. She felt like she finally understood New York. They were all here, together, on the subway. How lovely it was to spend time with all these people, if only for a short minute.

And then she missed her stop, and then she was deep in Brooklyn cursing the crowds, cursing that she took an express train, weaving in and out of people, getting back to Manhattan.

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