Sunrise

Sunrise

0:00

I still yearn for it. 

Still wonder over it. 

When it’s hard to believe, I can’t shake the memory of it. 

I can’t shake the legacy of it. The cells in me that came alive the first time. 

The death that always lived behind my eyes, drawn for the first time. 

As the sun rose in my soul on that very first night. 

Destruction melted from my brain, it used to puppeteer my hands but now they lay upwards, like solar panels to your sun. 

My lips, always one breath away from a knife’s tip, I’d grown accustomed to sharpness, but here the words dulled. 

Words were somehow nothing now, nothing I could capture and make tangible, no logic I could use to bridge the gaps between experience and understanding. 

Here I am, a speck before you, not even enough to cast a shadow, and it’s hard to even know where you end and I begin. 

Have I always been this way? Beneath the shadows, underneath the callouses and scars, was I always this soft? Joyful? The components of my body all humming like a melody, a choir where chaos once was. 

Like a rusty machine, well oiled and switched on. Cleansed deeply in every part and finally working. 

And you. Before that first sunrise I think I knew you. Your face was familiar, smooth like the glassy river and its steady current, silver in the cloud’s reflection. Your voice like the breeze that broke humidity in the summer. Your hands like the solid rock I curled into when life was falling apart. 

Your arms like old oak trees, your smile like the textured bark I told all my secrets too. Never judging, always leaning closer. 

There was your rainbow reflection in autumn’s leaves, in springs first bloom, in the smell of the grain harvest and Christmas dinner wafting into the corners of my room.

You were always there. The beating heart of my whole life, the shape of each breath, the cord of each conversation braiding my heart to another’s.

You were every good thing that made life worth living. Every angry, or cathartic, or mesmerising, or painfully honest song that gave my tormented emotions a home, there you were. Making space. Playing the key that made life’s hammer hit my strings and turn my suffering into a symphony. 

It’s a mystery how you gave me everything I need. Like a stubborn little candle in the corner of my life that refused to go out in every storm. Every time I thought it’d been extinguished, it was reborn. 

But you are not a candle now. I realise in the streaks of colour painted on my face that those moments were only a flicker, a brief glimpse, a blurred memory of the richness of your true living presence. 

Of your love, which once dripped on my shoulders and off my fingers, is now rushing above and below and all around me, and drawing me out of hiding and into open arms, both of us ready to receive one another. 

And it’s so perfect I feel I might die and go to heaven, or maybe I already have, because if all my life was building to this moment then I’m satisfied. There’s nothing else to taste in this life, there’s nothing else to want. Wanting has been subdued as my deepest needs call out, and are responded to, by you. 

The sun rose and set, and it rises and sets inside me at the movement of your fingers. How could I have imagined becoming your canvas, a character in your story, a tile of your mosaic. You mix the ash of my past with your light and bring forth colours, styles, perspectives that human genius could only chase. And we will. 

We will chase, stirred to move by the stroke of your pen, the gentle touch of your paint brush, as we are reborn again and again. Practicing newness in the one who is always new, in whose presence it is always now. 

And we will unfurl like hibiscus leaves hitting hot water, plump with your spirit, exuding your glory, ready in posture for the day we no longer chase, for you’ve caught the edge of us and pulled us into you. 

And two become one, as the land unrolls like a scroll and the sun casts out every shadow, laying us flat before you, unashamed, looking into your heavenly eyes. For on that day the light won’t harm us, it will transfigure us, and we will be like you.