John My Beloved.

Sometimes I wonder about the tides of whatever it is that I desire and how I am the man described in the epistle I like to avoid. What is my reflection? Have I forgotten the image of my own face? How much more the one made by hands uncreated? What is it that I avoid? What eternal glory do I forfeit because it is just too hard and the pleasures of my current life too great?

I remember there being a time, outside of arguments regarding delusion and misguided zeal. I remember something real. Something, not a feeling or a practice. I remember transcendence and the places it took me. Not is some vague way without name or form. But beyond name and form.

I remember Christ and how that name carried me in the arms of a mother. I remember where wisdom cradled me and rocked me to sleep. I remember the breaking of legs and the sheep lain on the back of a shepherd.

All these memories, some imaginary, some closer to actual events have lead to something eternal.

But I have also forgotten. My first love was pushed into the Jordan after baptism and I fled from the wilderness into the city, out of the clefts of rocks and into an opium den. I numb myself with everything that removes the shame of fleeing. I remember You in a sort of romantic view, as summer love between a junior and senior year of high school. You were like some silly thing that I smile at from childhood.

It's the pangs of Your absence that I must numb.

With anything.

With everything.

With rebellion and conformity. With tradition and breaking. With eating and drinking. Tomorrow I die.

Or an "I" dies, whoever that maybe. Go ask. The crucifixes lay in a pile in the corner. Sometimes, You are there. And at times, I. On rare occasions, both.

From the window, next to the pile, I stare out past the lights to the eternal black where we first met. It is the darkness in which You cover yourself. Somehow it seems more bright than the dying fluorescent of this artificial world.

I can't help but to think of the death of everyone I love, how my little world can crumble so easily outside my control. How nothing holds value. It isn't that I don't feel anything.

I feel everything.

I feel beauty. Life. And then death resurrected anew.

I find myself moving closer to the city's limit. Closer to the border of that desert where You gaze from Your darkness, where the sun burns with the intensity of that first encounter.