It's Like a Fire

By:
I. Wasn’therelasttime

A good friend of mine told me about twenty-three seconds ago to just let the past be the past, especially if it hurts so much. I must admit, that writing a devotional at this point in my life is one of the most difficult things I’ve agreed to do. In the past three months, I have learned that a best friend, a person who is in every way a diary, a journal with infinite pages to write every wound and every smile, but who also sees me as the same, can suddenly, due to actions and emotions, lock himself back up and storm away, leaving nothing but an empty room.
An empty room is like a fire, we expect it to breathe, but even though it dances, it only does so when the wind sighs into it. I was in an empty room. The paintless walls stare at each other, motionless. There is an iron table in the middle of the room; it has a sheet of paper resting on its back, and a pencil beside the sheet. The iron table matches the cold concrete floor, and few see it right away, we are blind in the room. Blind to everything in it but our own bodies, and what we believe to be solitude. I sat in a corner, facing the crevice where the two walls come together, there was a crack dripping down, a river in-between two shores.
The first things I found were dreams. Whenever I slept, which, in the room, does not happen often, I saw a shadow on the other side, at the other corner, just over there. At first, I thought it was solitude, but even solitude does not visit. I needed to get there. Something pushed me, the wind through fire maybe, but I tried to get to the other side. I turned from the corner, and crawled on my hands and knees, feeling through the room, I needed to get to the opposite corner, to see, did this one have a tear as well. And I needed to be near the shadow. I needed to know.
My hand felt the iron it did not know was there; due to blind eyes, while I inched toward the other side, and I was startled, and stood up. I ran my fingers along the top of it, trying to find what it could be, and I was met with the sheet of paper, and next, the pencil.
In the room, one does not know what to do. Thought is like the taste that comes in sleep. But one does not sleep, and if they do, they find dreams, and they find thought; but I was awake when I found the table, which I assumed it was. But the walls screamed, and one cannot listen in the midst of so much noise.
It was days before I slept again, and was able to listen to dreams and thought, but I eventually did. When I awoke after that sleep. I tore the paper off of the table, along with the pencil, and I wrote, and I erased, and this went on. But finally, I wrote what I knew I needed to write, especially to this paper, to that shadow in the corner, with this pencil.
“Help!”

Days went on, but so did lights, and flames. I looked around and I found the crack on the corner had shortened, as if someone had come through and patched it while I slept. I could see the table, paper and pencil. People come in. Those I know and love; they are here, and those I have never met; they come and go. My room changes every day, and I can sleep again. I have my paper, my pencil, my table, and walls. I have my corners, but I don’t sit there much anymore. There’s a shadow in my room, when it’s dark and when it’s light, at first I thought it was solitude, but she doesn’t exist, this I know because now, I write everyday, with the paper and the pencil, and even though I can see new cracks emerge in the wall, others get patched while I sleep.
My room is like a fire, it breathes, and it breathes because wind lives in it, and it will forever.

A Devo by our amazing Youth Lay Director Emily C.