Sacred

My father and I drove down to Lexington to see my sister graduate. We were on the road by 5 a.m. The two-and-a-half drive didn't affect me until we turned onto New Circle, and I directed him to my sister's house, reciting those turns, that liturgy I'd learned by heart last summer. His unfamiliar tires rolled past the path on which I used to run every morning. It was new to him, but I could remember my skin burning with the sweat I shed like poison, the sun-bright air I took into my lungs, swallowing fire with every step like the xiezhi as I listened to Florence and the Machine ('I must become a lion-hearted girl'). Now, shyly stepping back into this place as if I'd never left, it seemed that I was traveling through time like the xiezhi, as well. But the simile ends there. I cannot prevent violent change, not when I run to it with an instinctive need like hunger.

We stepped into my sister's house. It had never been mine, but now that they were selling it, it was even less so. I was a stranger. I didn't belong to the ghost of the girl who lived here. That I and I were parallel.

We drove past the bookstore where I used to work, with its seafoam-green, pointed dome rising out of Lexington Green like a basilica. I have now traveled to St. Peter's in Vatican City and San Marco's in Venice; the sight of that seafoam-green dome filled me with more spirituality than either of those breathtakingly beautiful places; it reminded me of all the places that had filled the space between me and last summer. I could never explain how important that time was, just as I could never tell you how I exited my mother's womb; I can only ever know and feel it afterward, can only then explain to you how I exist.

My holy ground is not the same as yours. Sacredness is more than humble, bloodless faces carved from marble, dappled with red, yellow, and violet light from stained glass. Birth is quieter than white, more fluid than water.


Xiezhi