Of Heavens and Lesser Gods

Some nights the sky is so low that it feels as if an old friend came down to listen for a moment, and I say nothing. I have learned that, sometimes, silence can have a greater vocabulary than the words we speak. If I said something, I might say your name, and names are dangerous things. Names are what we trade the infinite for. And haven’t we lost enough? 

I always thought heaven was a place above the blue: some kind of architecture of fleeting forgiveness, built on those who simply endured. But, as I grew older and buried more moments than I created, I started to suspect heaven was never a place, but an event: a look that is held too long, a quiver of breath between two quaking bodies, a heartbeat that mistakes another for its echo. In that sense, you were my heaven. You always were. 

Yet Heaven is a delicate thing. It does not shatter in thunder; it melts in tenderness. The way your name still lingers at the verbs in my sentences is as if the heavens confound me with a memory they will not shake. Sometimes, I wonder if we ever loved each other, or simply imagined we did, at a time when time conked out. 

You see, I have become a little suspicious of the divine. If there were a God, he or she must be cruel, because they allow mortals to think they feel eternity, then steal it away. But maybe that cruelness is the only truth in creation. To allow us to witness something perfect, and then we know what its absence is, when its absence. You were a lesser God for me and not a God because you made immortality look insignificant. 

You were a God not because of the divine, but for the unbearable beauty of a thing that is not to be eternal: you were divine like dying stars are divine, burning down and down until they become light simply for dying. You taught me to believe in the holiness of the impermanent, in the holiness of decay. 

You taught me that after love, the soul doesn't ascend; it deepens, and hence a Lesser God. Some days, I walk through the world as if I am walking through a temple built of memories. Every street, every wind, every shadow is an echo of the liturgy of us. 

I soak you in from places we have never been, as if absence itself is now sentient, moving me with reminders of what I cannot forget. Maybe that's what grief is: a religion, a belief, practiced in the wasteland of faith. There are times when I softly say your name, not as a prayer but as a rebellion against oblivion, a despotic time, against the notion one must have 'utility' for love to be true, in good conditions, when the wind rises in affirmation to the sound of my voice, I convince myself it is you, instead of a ghost, the afterthoughts of the universe remembering what it once allowed to be. 

I don't know if the universe is caring or indifferent; I have come to believe that it is intimate, that for every star, every atom remembers the heat of a singular touch it once held. So perhaps somewhere in the physics of things, you and I are still being. Somewhere, we never ended. You showed me that eternity is not a length of time, but a frequency of intensity. Not a measure of time passed, but the unbearable intensity of one lived moment. And in this way, we have already been. 

If I ever came across you again, outside the clocks, outside the anxiety of inevitabilities, I would not ask for forgiveness, or for eternity. I would only ask for a single moment for time to pause, and for the holy to look the other way; just one moment where we can love without consequence, exist without explanation, and breathe not knowing how quickly it will come to an end. Until then, here I am—part pilgrim, part heretic—adoring inferior gods setting up humble altars under the shadow of memory.

 I remain loyal to destruction, faithful to the pain, loving the silence that used to be filled with your voice. 

Because if heaven ever was, it was not above us. It was between us. And even if the heavens have fallen long ago, I still live among the ruins.