Re: Living Room: Hannah & David
David was incapable of forgetting who he was, or what, or why, or what had come before. It was what made it completely impossible for him to effortlessly integrate himself back into the living world. He could only inhabit it halfway. He could understand better now what Amy had felt then, and perhaps what Hannah felt now. At the time, there had only been the worry, and Molly's eternal, helpless, exhausted concern. It didn't change the fact that she would have thrown herself in front of a moving train for her siblings, and maybe that was its own brand of unhealthy, born of nothing going quite right when they were younger.
This party, on the other hand, was a place where ordinary people with ordinary troubles could celebrate light in the deep of winter. There was a touch of comfort in that, even now. "Are you an acrobat?" he asked, with a smile. He could almost see it. The tiny book club actually made the smile reach his eyes. "What does the really, really tiny bookclub read?"
"I cannot paint what then I was...that time is past, and all its aching joys are no more, and all its dizzy raptures. There is a good poem about that feeling," he said. "Going back to something you remember as so beautiful that, in a different place in your life, you are sure it could never have the same effect again. So we build castles for ourselves, and little dreams of what those memories were to us when we lived them. As long as you don't see them again, you can keep the castles up, I think. And people can keep them with them, something special to get out of bed with, and keep living." He paused a moment. "I don't worry that the memories aren't real. I know they are. But I know they are a consequence of who I was then, and who I am now."
She switched gears from philosophical thought to thought so quickly that he couldn't help but react. He leaned back slightly. He was watching her expression. "You're good at getting people to talk," he said. He could say nothing aloud for days at a time, and then Hannah would take him by the arm and he would spout a dozen sentences of armchair philosophy and battered theology. But the question meant more than that. He had been thinking about it, in the cold and quiet hours out in the woods, as he wrapped his arms around his body and tried to ignore the pull on his spine to get up and go.
"I believe in hell," he said. "And sin. And heaven. But not in the way I did. Not in such a...not in a regiment of orderly angels and a coterie of demons. Fire, torture, purgatory for the unbaptized and the unforgiven." There was dirt under his fingernails, and it caught his attention. "I believed in rules. I didn't want to believe in chaos. Now, I do." Softer. "Maybe the dead each see a different heaven or a different hell. I think there are rules, but they're broad and wide. Doing good, doing evil, and self-determination. I don't think He cares about eating meat on a Friday. If he cares about anything, it's the living, the dead, and what they've done to each other. Whether they've asked for forgiveness, and whether they've been forgiven. That's it."
He crossed himself, once, lifting his fingers to heaven, and he smiled. He had never preached to anyone in the family, even when his faith was at its most ardent. When asked, though, he had always been fond of debating a theological point with passion and humor. There was none of that here now.
"The proof: when I decided to become a priest, I expressed stigmata of the hands and feet when coming off an absolute, rock-bottom bender. It's true," he said, as if it were a joke, expecting a laugh. "I'd been thinking about it, but that pushed me over the edge. How many have been more deserving? I didn't even last a decade in the vocation, but men and women believing, sacrificing and suffering all their lives, and never once seeing a miracle." He tipped his head against his shoulder. "I drank. And behold; an angel."