1944 (Cymbeline)

The nave emptied into the street, into the night, exhaling the last of its keep upon snow and cobble. I remain alone with the marbled saints, their tongues as silent as mine, as silent as the vestibule after the doors closed. Only the flicker of candles speaking of human hands, of the shiver of prayer, of hope, of beginnings and, perhaps too, of endings.

In the absence of joy, that tide of happiness released into those narrow stone corridors, I sat. Cold returned with the dark, my knees as a child before the father. And what had been held was released, my face a muddy mess, alive I knew by evidence of tear, the economy of the thorned heart, as productive as the bomb factories back home.

There was no place to kneel, but I kneeled anyway. I wanted to feel the cold stone, wanted the pain to take my mind away from my own self-indulgent sorrow. I draped my arms over the chair in front of me, laced my fingers and looked toward the alter, toward the icons of veneration. I said a few words to myself that others might consider a prayer. But there was nothing. Nothing but silence and pain and cold. Just me kneeling in a cold dark church, alone. I felt as if God was in the forsaken business and I thought if he could do what he did to his son, what could, would he do with me? I was beginning to think I knew the answer. And I envied the ignorant.

After some time, my knees are numb and I no longer see the point of my self-inflicted pain. I return to the war tomorrow. There will be enough pain; as an ocean to my bucket, only what is wet is red and what burns is the realization there is nothing you can do to stop the tide. So we endure and don’t much talk about it.

Churches always bring out the confessional in me so I’ll say this too: we don’t much pray about it either. I pull upon the massive wooden door, a cold blast of winter rushes in, flickering candles and rustling a few missives. My hair feels frosted with a hairspray of snow. The streets are silent now and mostly dark under the clouded sky. My hotel is just a few blocks down the street. I walk alone. There is no sense that he is with me. There have been no visions or visitations. He left me memories but no more. My heels are my meditation, clicking stone like clock, my breath perfuming the air, my eyes dry in the cold.

I couldn’t sleep so I did what I always do, read. I read until I wept, such the power of Cymbeline, of this stanza:

‘Till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay follow’d him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air; and then
Have turn’d mine eye and wept.

And so I wept, wept for what I didn’t have. Wept for what I knew I’d never have. And in this way, upon my wet pillow, found slumber waiting.

When I woke, I returned to Cymbeline with my coffee as I sat before my window, ledged in snow. I read but a few lines:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

And I wept again as if sleep were an interlude, a temporary respite. My tears as the snow, falling and falling without end.