Fiction

"It's non-fiction," she said. "It helps me understand." That reality was a dose, for sure. She was non-fiction, all of her, and he was reading stories and poetry at the time. The mistress that is his own imagination was begging for something tangible and knowing all along that the other side of the nexus, where material ends and the unseen begins, was the only place he ever touched the truth. The comment took him by surprise, he expected something quite different from his imagination. She was too often reasonable and he thought he knew what made her tick. "If you want to understand, you might want to find a good story," he said.

He wondered why it was that non-fiction kept him so far from the truth. "I have a lot of non-fiction in my life," he thought. "Every minute of the day, I think is non-fiction, I need more fiction to make sense of it all".

He stood in the sanctuary looking at the icon of the Trinity. The three beings, God, all of them, tilted their heads to each other. Spirit and Son to the Father, and Father to the two of them. He stood, his hands and arms limp at his sides. Up above him there was light, purple all of it mixed up, every color otherwise individual from the stained glass, but together purple. Purple light above, the Trinity straight across, and there was the back of the priest's head in front of him. That's when he knelt down, feeling ficticious. Part of a story. He was a character in this drama, but only a bit player. He was there to remember how the story ended.

"That's the thing," he thought. "That's the thing that keeps me coming back here. I can't escape the back of that priest's head, nor his face, anymore than I can escape the fact that I was preserved for some reason." He was not thinking it, but he was present in the midst of a restless grace. It was later when he wrote it down, '...restless grace'. "Hmmm, that's it." he thought, "restless grace is how God is. On the other side of the priest, that's what was there in the Trinity icon, grace that doesn't sleep." The remembering began.

He felt better, lighter when he stood up in the end. His non-fiction imagination still with him, waiting quietly for a time when she could tap him on the shoulder, "May I ask you something?" He would rather she didn't. But when she did, he was comforted to know that she also felt lighter. So he nodded. "Where," she asked, "can I get a copy of what you're reading?" She had come along too. It wasn't until later that he asked her how she had decided to read with him. "I couldn't help it," she paused, "...I found a story."