Driving through trees illuminated by sunlight and quaint little houses tucked quietly and spaciously into one another, you arrive at a family house where people stay and find stability. You find yourself in a back room with art covering the walls. These sketches beckon to the ache and confusion that can and does reside in this idyllic, back country world in which family protects you and holds each other accountable to the righteous life. It is oppressive but also safe and innocent searching the eyes of the people in this world, which are revealingly told in the painting and sketches on the wall.
Your friend is getting married and she is trying on her wedding dress. The one that you helped her pick out 9 long months ago. It is exactly as you remember it against her delicate frame, features, and soft blonde hair that hangs along the beading down the back. She is the Virgin Mary on the night Gabriel came to her. So trusting and protected by the course she takes because it keeps her pulled in to this secluded world in which people stay together--marriages last. This protection is like a seal that locks in so much quiet suffering. It is a hard path to take. All of this is mixed in my heart as I cherish her image of grace in the mirror. She will walk toward one man in just two short months and they will hold each other as long as life allows them to. They will experience first times together and their bodies will know each other for the first time and it will remain this private, chosen eros for as long as they live.
I love her as my sister but I will not stay here. As I walk out the front door and down the path I turn to smile at her and know she will close the outside and go to him where he waits in a quiet, solitary room in the tucked away house.
Driving back through the trees leaves me profoundly aware that I am moving in a direction that is oppositional to the life represented by the purity of her image created in white lace and beading that is now reflected in my mind. I've already made the choice, I've already breached my own purity on a drunken night from which no consistency remains. I've already chosen not to keep my dress so white as hers. I continue to move in the direction of unsolicited sensuality that lasts a moment, not a lifetime. I have already made this choice and she will stay there and I will keep moving toward my ownness. I will make choices by questioning what drives my decisions. I will constantly work towards faith and recognize fear but then let it fall back where the trees will hide it in those back country roads. I am choosing uncertainty and men who strive for authenticity rather than to be good. I am choosing to realize there may not be just one man and he won't be what I've pictured or held out for. Because if I were to keep waiting for that man I still would be--my life would be stagnant.
Ultimately I am choosing freedom, ambiguity, I am allowing my life to be messy because that is what my heart needs to be. This is what I've always needed--room, spaciousness to allow my heart and body to "love what it loves (Mary Oliver)."
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