It's that everyone else did.
How did I get here? Back to being the makeshift oracle to whom they chuck their infections and cry, "Please pass this to your God for me."
I drove a stranger to a (good) strange church today.
She said, "Then I realized that I was living everybody else's life and losing mine. So I packed my things and drove from Cincinnati to these snowcapped mountains and ocean."
The good book doesn't say, "Consider all their needs and make a wise decision that benefits everyone." It says, "Go to the land I will show you." Will show. Future tense. With no hint of "them" or "everyone."
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In the dream, my car was parked outside my best friend's apartment, where I've been crashing for several months. I went downstairs to move it from its metered spot and found the window smashed in.
In real life, this past winter, my sister's car window was smashed in outside my mom's apartment. Then my boyfriend's roommate's car also, the morning he needed to use it to pick me up from the airport.
In the dream, those other two cars flashed through my mind and I cried out, "Is there nowhere I can go? Not to my mother's place, not to my boyfriend's place, not to my best friend's place? Is there nowhere that is safe?"
And a whirlwind stirred within me and whistled, "Yes. Go to the desert." Then after that dream, over and over again in real life: Yes, yes, yes. Go to the desert. Yes.
Forty days, forty nights in the desert (hopefully beginning Wednesday). How's that for cliché?
A preparation, of sorts. A consecration of myself for what is yet to come. What is yet to come? I'm not fully sure. (...the land I will show you). But I see it breathing. I see it wiggling at the end of those forty days.
M said to me today: Forty days! Yes, good. That is a luxury. We all need that time to go away and do that.
Unbelievably refreshing. To hear someone say, "Yes." And not "But what about — "
Expectant. Fiery.
