A Happy Ending

I am writing my own happy ending.  I am finally ready to admit that God is helping. A lot.

Writing is what I do—what I have nearly always done. I write on scraps of envelope on the table beside my bed. I write with short stubs of pencil on receipts stuffed into my wallet. I write in notes on my cell phone, and in encrypted files which are forever gone once the passwords die with me.

At times, I have been lonely and without love. I suspected that it was because I was undeserving. I may have been right. I lived metaphorically alone as within the cloisters of some ancient abandoned monastery. I turned inward and I wrote a monologue that evolved into a dialog between my own quarreling voices. An angel on one shoulder sought a better, fuller, more authentic and healthy life. A devil on the other shoulder spoke of fear, shame, betrayal, and the eventual withering of the spirit.

In my darkest days I had no sane counsel.  There was no one I could really talk to, no one save God. He offered no understandable reply. In fact, God seemed perfectly content to watch me suffer, or even to make things worse if He was even watching at all. The love that had been promised by my grandmother and every Sunday school teacher I had ever known was a lie. There is no greater abandonment than when God turns His back.

It is only now that I understand the Divinity of ink, of pencil, and of keystroke.

The door to my room was often locked and I scribbled for hours in journals. Ink flowed and words spilled in rushes, like the tears of a thousand good cries. I wrote of love and loss and betrayal; of strangers, lovers, mothers, and fathers. I wrote about everything I could possibly think to write about, and in it my own life was saved. Sanity came slowly and it took a long time. The good angel—she won out.

The wall fell less dramatically than Berlin in 1989, but with the love of kind people, fall to ruins it did. The peacetime coming and going began. Some good people even stayed and settled nearby. It’s a happy ending.

Even if MTSWW never calls or texts me again—which seems increasingly unlikely—it is still a happy ending.