Friday's Child

The story doesn't end on the morning you find the stone rolled away. 

You'd wept at his feet,  crumpled like dirty rags on the brow of a hill, nauseous with black despair beneath his half closed lids and sprayed by his blood.   You'd made a pact:  you surrendered everything to him then, gave him your whole self - so he wouldn't leave you.  And he promised too;  with his dying breath he said he would never leave you nor forsake you, even in death.  Then two  days later as you find unexpected reprieve and new hope  - you run , head thrown back in the wind, arms spread wide as though to embrace the whole world, giddy with so much joy you thought your heart would explode  - and forget all you've vowed.

No.  It doesn't work like that.   In death as in life, and in afterlife, the  Master of Time  remembers everything you've said.  He  heard you even as his life drained away like so many grains of sand.  Although he'd never condemn you for  forgetting so quickly, he still hopes you meant all that you've whispered to him when you thought no one else was listening.

You go about your business, your busyness,  just like before.  You get up each day, fall into familiar clothes and familiar ways.  You step into your same old same old:  known faces,  well worn words.  Then once or twice, you find some words catch in your throat at odd moments.  You do something, like you always did, and halfway through it your hand strangely pauses - your brain and your body hit a disconnect, causing  you to knock over half cold coffee all over your paperwork.  You cuss like you habitually do, and it feels like you've bitten on broken glass - you want to spit something out but it was only your words.

So your whole day unravels and eventually collapses. It started with the smallest thing and then everything else seemed to tumble downhill, and your universe implodes on itself.  You blame the whole world, but deep inside you know, somehow, that it's not the world at all.  It's you.  

Then you remember.  His eyes.  They burned when your uptilted, pale, small face told him, only two days ago, that you would change.  You promised him all the good you could muster.  You gave up your treasures to him:  lives and loves, people, places and things you couldn't be without.  You laid down your imperfections also, opened up your heart and begged him to take away all that causes your ruin and damnation.  Interstingly, these weren't much different from your treasures.   In faithful surrender you told him HE was the only one who mattered, and even if it cost you everything, you'd give up everything for him and him alone.

How could you have thought you could live your old life again, when you have begun to walk down the path of a new way, where nothing is the same any more, all the rules changed, your entire world rocked and a different place?   Old things no longer fit:  all your words,  thoughts, emotions and actions have to be re-ordered. You allowed it; you allowed Him. And with each drip drip drip of his blood you made him start something in you which gained momentum and became irreversible.

Surely these early days will be hard.  You're like a snake that's shed its skin, growing a new one that is only just beginning to encrust around  exposed flesh. Your previous cover which you've been hiding under is gone.  Your securities so stripped, you feel tender against a new wind, unsure of strange and novel sensations: the rawness, the heightened sense of heat or cold.  Sometimes it actually hurts.  No wonder newborns cry - after days of darkness the light can be just too much;  after prolonged and muffled silence, the noise of the cosmos has too many jarring notes in it to comfortably bear.

But you promised. And because you promised, what will come to pass is a daily stripping off of old snake skins, a daily reclothing of near insufferable holiness.  None of your journeys will be simple again, and every road - EVERY road - will fork:  one taking you back to where you came from; and the other leading you always up that hill to where this all began.  You will find yourself gazing up at him, ashen gaunt face that still glows somehow in near death.  And in the roar of his silent gaze upon you, you will hear echoes of all the promises you have made to him that day.