More from the "Creative Challenge" Days: Pray in Your Darkness

Here's another something I wrote a couple years ago as a creative project with my photographer friend. The challenge: Pray in Your Darkness

I think it is interesting how fluid language is. How the same word can take on different meanings, how context is so important when forming your perception of a sentence’s meaning.

In this experiment (As you Pray in your Darkness), most of the words in this short sentence can be interpreted so differently, which is what made it so challenging for me to organize my thoughts. Pray or prey (depending on whether the sentence is spoken or written),“in” meaning location versus meaning direction, darkness as an emotional state versus a physical absence of light, and “your” referring to one person or more than one.

As you Pray in your Darkness

Your memory serves you well.

You remember when you and he signed the lease to that simple, two-story house on the corner of Johnson Street and Copper Penny Avenue and it became yours.

Nothing fancy. The graying shudders were slightly crooked; the guest bathroom was painted an odd shade of purplish pink that was slightly reminiscent of the cotton candy you threw up after riding the tilt-a-whirl on your first date together. The floorboard closest to his side of your king-sized bed creaked when he got up in the middle of the night to pee, and the driveway sloped so that the bottom of his front bumper would scrape against its edge every time he backed his car out, no matter how slowly he went.

Yes, a bit run down or “charming” as you optimistically referred to it, but you mostly didn’t mind its faults. It was yours.

It was yours the day you got your first promotion at work. It was yours that time you made love on the kitchen counter when he left that sucking mark on the rise of your left breast, another on your neck that you had to cover up with makeup in order to hide it from co-workers the next day.

The walls of your house stood sturdy when he came back home drunk after fighting earlier with each other about finances and you threw the pot lid at his head, missing by a long shot. It was your place to retire to after a long day at work and it became your “home” with the birth your first child together.

Yes, it was yours.

Interesting, that word “yours.” With an “s” on the end, “your” is irrevocably plural. But add in marriage, coupledom, and language is suddenly bent. Maybe because when you’re married, it is expected that two become one.

So when friends would ask, how are your kids, you respond because they were referring to the children you and he together brought into creation.

Or when they would ask, “What are your plans for the holiday?” they immediately expected you to explain how you would be spending part of the time with your family in Florida, the rest of the time with his family in Ohio.

Your is something different now. Sure, the word is still the same but the meaning is not. Now when they say, “How is your cat,” they specifically mean the one that keeps you, and only you awake at night. Or, “How is your job?,” expecting you to say that it is okay and to complain about some tiresome boss when you really feel like saying that the expected monotony of the day is the only thing that keeps you from giving up every morning. When you really feel like admitting that it is the only thing worth living your life for now that he’s gone.

You ask God for strength, but he seems to have stopped listening. Maybe he is tired of your pleading. Maybe he knows you really want him to turn back time and to take away what he allowed to happen. You want him to give your life back. You want it all to be a bad dream from which to awake. You pray to God that it never happened. That you never got that call from the hospital saying there had been an accident. That that driver never would have fallen asleep at the wheel and he never would have slammed his truck into the driver’s side of your husband’s car. You never would have been haunted by the sound of a flat line and you never would have become a widow at age 36.

He would still be here and this would be your bed. This night you would be together and you would lie beneath him as he presses into you, so warm, so familiar, so good.

But this is now only your bed in this darkened room and God stopped listening long ago.

You snuggle in tight beneath the wrinkled sheet and you pretend that the pillow curled up next to you is his body and for one second you believe it. Then cold reality hits you like a backhanded slap and you remember that this is your life. You wish it weren’t, as you pray in your darkness until the peaking sliver of daybreak.