A Narrative

Scribbled by Sparrow


So.

Sparrow was scribbling about at schoolwork early on in the semester, and for her composition class she was asked to sew together a very brief narrative piece about visiting a hospital. The purpose was to convey emotion through description, and she could choose to describe a visit to a family member soon to come home, or an elderly relative on their deathbead.

Naturally, she chose the depressing one. Wouldn't you?

I post this for little other virtue than the mere sake of doing so, I suppose. If it causes you to slip into my same moony, reflective mood - well, I would say I am sorry, but as I'm not completely adverse to the feeling myself, perhaps I shouldn't.  

*       *       *

My hand jerked away from the door-handle and I clenched my fingers, tingling from the metal’s coldness. At least, the handle had seemed cold. Yet as I reached out my hand to turn it once more, I could see that my fingers were trembling.

The door swung open slowly—oh, how slowly!—into the hospital room. I knew what I would see when I entered; the whitewashed walls, starchy bed-linens and cold, hard floor were all familiar to me now. And as I stepped inside, I braced myself for the blankness: the whiteness, the whiteness, the—

Gold? I blinked, my gaze turning to the window. The shade that usually kept the room in dimness had been lifted, the crisp white curtains drawn apart. The glow of the sunset was spilling through, dancing like burnished pennies upon the pale walls and filling the room with a warming glow.

At first I did not understand. I could not; the room had no right to look so cheery, the sun no right to be so warm. But as I looked through the pane at the horizon, suddenly, somehow, it made sense. The light of the setting sun was not vibrant—it was dying. Soon it would be gone, and the beauty with it.

As I knelt next to the hospital bed, I knew that it would not be the only beautiful thing to leave me soon. But as I reached a wavering hand over to the wrinkled one lying still on the covers, the golden light surrounded me like a blanket. And I knew... the sun, at least, would be back tomorrow.

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The Trace

Scribbled by Sparrow

Rambling... because the thoughts of Tonight
are too awake to sleep until Tomorrow.
The wind was cold.

It carried the spice of winter on its breath, tugging fallen leaves round the parking lot in an airy whorl. The sky was already taken by midnight, throne to a gold-leafed moon which cast shadows of light against the clouds. I could feel the pavement through the thin soles of my shoes; I lingered there, waiting apart from the crowd of people that remained huddled about the lit-up church building. Every moment they lingered delayed our departure—but I didn’t mind. If only to be breathing in the cool wind alone, and to cling to a wasting moment beneath the moon, I was glad to wait.

I cupped my hands about my face, blocking out the glaring lights and blinking owlishly up at the dark unfurled sky as I sought the stars. I found them, glinting like shrouded diamonds in the scattered white-gold dust of clouded moonlight. With each glimpse and glimmer my heart bounded with delight, captured in the sort of childish enchantment that only emerges once a heart has grown old. Painfully old, perhaps: attuned to beauty through an aching fierce and terrible.

But even as I counted the sky-diamonds, I felt a thrust of a disappointment as childish as my delight. The stars were beautiful, yet still my heart sank at the sight of them. It seemed that their sparkling was tainted, as by a veil draped mockingly between earth and sky, letting through only the barest glimmers of reaching starlight. And as though what meager light did manage to squeeze through was forced to linger far above the earth, too far to touch, near enough only to spectate quietly on the happenings of a wretched world: a world deprived of starlight.

Frustration nipped within my chest like a dog rounding upon a frenzied hare. I half-reached a hand toward the sky, wanting to tear away the shroud that hung there and unveil the burning light of the stars, to let them fall upon the earth like flame to candle and watch the trees turn to quicksilver. To set the whole world alight… perhaps it would be too glorious, too beautiful a sight for us even to go on living. But it would be enough, if only for one blazing moment, to have seen the world in molten silver.

Yet as my hand parted from my face, the church lights darted back into my vision. Slowly I lowered both of my hands and turned to the light, blinking uncomprehendingly as the dim starglow fled before a flood glaring yellow-white. I wilted before it. Though the stars' dimness had pained me, at least they had been gentle. This light was cruel, stabbing through my eyes and into my mind until its brightness washed out the memory of gentler things. 
Still, I did not turn away. I gazed, like a mesmerized owlet, at the crowd of people before me. They were dark shadows against the brightness, milling about the sidewalk and lingering within the glass doors through which the light shone. Voices, laughter, shouting—sounds I had not noticed when my mind was consumed by the stars—all came rushing into my ears. Mocking, they surrounded me in a depth of loudness and confusion: loud for the strength of them, confusing not only for their clamor, but for their joy. I could not understand the laughter, nor the voices which spoke words I could not decipher, but were full of carefreeness. They lingered in the harsh, false light, embracing the setting as though it was beautiful. As though it was… home.

I turned away suddenly, tearing my eyes away from the light. Still the glare of it burned in my vision, a brand upon my eyelids. I felt my way around the side of the large church van parked beside me and pressed my back against it, sliding down to sit upon the ground. There, with the van between me and the brightness, I pressed my hands against my closed eyes and was still. As the light faded away I lingered still, huddled beneath the moon with the cold wind chasing my wrists and the murmur of voices muffled in the distance. I hugged my knees against my chest and stared upward, seeking the stars once more; when I found them this time I rested back my head and trained my eyes upon them, drinking them in. It might have been dim, but at least the starlight was real.

Real… oh, yes, it was real. But it was dying, too. I blinked, remembering what I had always known, and yet had somehow managed to forget. For I knew that the dimness of the stars was not merely a veil between earth and sky, but that the stars shone with a fading light, because they moved with the heartbeat of a fading world. Just as the vanishing moon reflected the light of a dying sun, and the oceans the glimmering glow of both; and just as every part of creation knew the groaning of death and sorrow—as with all of these, so it was with the stars, and so it was with me. I held no bitterness for the others and their comfort in the light. But somehow, in the aching that had made me a child again, I had glimpsed a beauty worth aching for… and when I had, my view of the things of this world could never be the same.

At last I heard the falling of footsteps and voices growing louder and nearer. I scrambled to my feet as the others wandered over to the place where I waited, finally having said their good-byes. They were still talking and laughing, and they took no notice of me, though somehow I didn’t mind. As the cold wind drove the shadows closer, everyone clambered into the van, ready at last to go home.

The cloud-wreathed moon hung above us as we drove through the darkness, and I huddled by the window and stared back at it where it loomed above the night like a lesser sun. I leaned my head against the pane, suddenly realizing that I was tired. Still I gazed at the moon as our journey went on, my thoughts wandering, as my mind grew more tired, to when I would at last be home.

What home? Only God knew which would gather me first: the home that claimed my wandering, or the home that stole my heart. Yet I knew, somehow, that my feet had longer yet to wander here, in the paths that wind between bitterness and brokenness and bind them in the end, at last, into some finished thing of Healing.

Until then, in the stealing sleepfulness of  the night, perhaps I would dream; if only for a little while, of the lights beyond the night -- stars that blaze like fire, as quick and fierce as a stab of silver.
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How Brief the Flight to Eternity

Scribbled by Sparrow

It was only a few moments ago...

 I was huddled over my psychology book, precariously situated up-top the stool beside our kitchen island. My window reflected the same near-autumn view it has framed since this morning; all of dove-gray and charcoal. A few feet from me, the dishwasher gargled menacingly from its own little corner, loudly proclaiming the fulfillment of its duties as the backdrop for my studies.

Until suddenly, it stopped. Stopped, utterly and completely. I was left with nothing but the sound of... nothing. From a gurgling, muted sort of roar to absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing.

Nothingness.

Nothing.

I lifted my eyes and looked out the window at the gray sky swarming over the trees, heart beating amain as my ears waited breathlessly for the trumpet sound to pierce the utter silence. For surely, that was to come next...? The awful blast, the terrible rending of the sky and the furling of it as a curtain, and then our longing fulfilled; our stealing away into the deep, beautiful mystery that is all of God's splendor, to be secret to us no longer. No more the jeweled veil of the heavens to stand as a shield between us and the terrible beauty of the Almighty, as the glory of our rapture ushers us into His infinity... no more the aching of this world, no more the shadows; everything, everything swept away in the mighty gust of the Eternal's beckoning. All the echoes of eternity to erupt in splendor in the mere breath of one beautiful, awful moment.


A single moment of silence.


*       *       *

Had I held my breath until the trumpet blast, my heart would by now have stopped beating. It never came.

 The house soon returned to sound, my heart to its sighing rhythm, and as soon as this is posted I shall return to studying for my Psychology exam. Yet, I find that I cannot do so quite the same. For in me is a heart within which beats something of eternity, that ever-aching thrum of longing, of tiredness, of yearning... of hope. Oh, the fluttering rhythm is always there: it never leaves, but it is so often lost beneath the mutterings of the Temporary Reality. Only when these mutterings are stilled may it again be noticed, standing out suddenly as a smattering of paint on a blank canvas or the plucking of a single harpstring. The moment of remembrance is pierced with an aching like nothing I have ever known, yet which is more familiar to me than anything, because I have always known it.

 Yet nothing, not even the aching, can quell the bursting joy that slashes through the numb shadows of our temporal existence when we seize the knowledge of Reality. For the reason we long, the reason we ache, is because we are straining for something Real—a beauty beyond our tactile mirrors and smoke. It is the ardent longing for the truth of Eternity that is not only our sorrow, but our solace. What we long for will not be held away forever: it will come, in a bounding, leaping dawn of Jubilee.

A single moment of silence—may every moment be so full of eternity.
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