deep places

For me: the deep places are Home.

In all ways but the most practical, I am currently homeless. I shy away from depths, and I tell myself it's easier, because of pain - my history with it, my habits around it. My having been disproportionately focused on it, not as a perpetual victim, but in years of having been controlled by it - shunning it as weakness or wrongness, until I was no longer able; then crafting it into something pleasing or "constructive," as though I could ever redeem it.

Pain is not what it once was, and it never will be again. I am no longer capable of postponement or denial; I can no longer suppress. For all my origins in deep places of Truth, if I am made to pursue and articulate Truth: the God I seek is present in my pain. How many times have I heard other people utter that phrase, having no idea what it really meant? where it led? what it meant to the person saying it?

Lately, though, I only notice depths as I pass them by; I skate across dark, mirrored surfaces, and I can't bring myself to know what they hold. I can't breathe deeply enough to re-enter the deep places where Truth rushes and blooms, electric and liquid in the dark, like a bloodstream-baptism, where your words do not matter is swallowed up in that words are made for Truth, and in the depths, they rush, like a current, one into the other, in hundreds and thousands and millions nearly in vain of the Truth they approach, as though the Truth might find its glory or its limits in syllables. I drown, open-air, for lack of submersion; I grieve the death of voice for dread of where I'll find it again.

I am just so sick of pain, and the mess of my history with pain has culminated in the fact that I am now totally unaccustomed to being in pain. Not unaccustomed to pain, by a long shot; unaccustomed to being in pain. Being, in pain. Existing, in pain. Living, in pain. Becoming, in pain. Abiding pain. Integrating pain. Hearing, in pain. Delving, in pain. All of it, let alone how to let other people into it, or keep them out.

I miss lingering in deep places. I find, though, that even as I haunt outposts, the Truth progresses in spite of me, and Home and I are aware of each other, and it exists in current, always moving, always alive, always outstretched toward me, waiting for me, but not.