The Art of Holding On

            Except for a smoldering orange patch crowning the hill which had hidden the sun, the whole sky was a grey twilight-blue. And I was in the middle of it, standing on the peak of a sloped gravel road. My shoes were in my hand; I felt the roughness of each sharp pebble beneath my feet. The ground all around me sloped downwards and sideways until the it vanished altogether, popping up again as trees and hills in the distance. My private gravel road was an island in that sea of trees and hills. The wind pushed my hair back from my face. Lifting my hands, I could feel it rush through my fingers. It laced in between each one of them, blowing through like silk ribbons. No matter how tightly I clenched my fists, I couldn’t catch hold of the wind-ribbons.

They made me think of Dicey’s Song, a beautiful book Mrs. Brock gave me to read a week or two ago. I have a nasty habit of reading quickly, devouring the plotline and the characters in one late, lamp-lit night. Dicey’s Song is the sort of book I’ll have to go back to, stretching it through afternoons and rainy days. Dicey felt the wind-ribbons, too.

“She thought to herself, she had to let go of what had gone before too, didn’t she? The people of last summer. And who she had been. Dicey felt as if she was standing in the wind and holding up her hands. She felt as if colored ribbons blew out of her hands and danced away on the wind. She felt as if, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t close her fingers around those ribbons. Dicey knew that she was sitting very still on a train, moving across the night. She knew her hands were wrapped around the wooden box that held the ashes of her momma. But she felt as if a wind blew through her hands and took even Momma away. What did that leave her with? The wind and her empty hands. The wind and Dicey.”

            Lisa and I were stretched out on my bedroom floor, reading through the names on the back of my Regionals t-shirt from 2010. Some people I thought I would hold onto for a while have slipped through my fingers. Other names, names that were only strings of letters to me then, have blown back around in the wind and become woven into my life without me hardly realizing it. I feel helpless.

            Lately my life has been tossed by the wind, fragmented. I leap between the world of speech and debate and my regular, San Antonio world. Sometimes the leap leaves me with a bit of jet-lag, and I don’t know how to connect to people in one group when I first leave the other. Ribbons are slipping through my fingers, out of my reach.

Words make more sense on paper. Writing doesn’t puff away as easily as thoughts. I wish I could write everyone I know a letter, telling them exactly what they mean to me. (Because even the people I talk to only once or twice have a place in my heart, especially if they are one of the many who took the time to draw me out when I felt most alone. That’s a lot more often than anybody would realize.) But the wind keeps blowing, and time and friends and words and emotions are snatched away and jumbled and sometimes blown back. Other times they are tossed from my island forever. I’m left with two ribbons that manage to stay wrapped securely around my heart.

            Dear friend, please don’t let me go. Even if I seem absent when I talk to you, even if I joke or forget to text or act like I don’t care. Even if I’ve just met you, or if we don’t know each other well yet. Please try to hold onto me. I need you, I want to know you, all of you.

            And even if the wind blew away everything I thought to cling to, this would stay constant: 

“As high as the heavens are over the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to His children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. For he knows our frame, He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.” (Psalm 103:10-17)

Sometimes I wonder what Dicey wondered-

“You tell me to let go. But you told me to reach out, you told me to hold on. How can I do all those things together?”

            I can’t hold onto all the ribbons on my own. But if I cling to Him, everything will eventually be woven together with His love, for His glory. My God is faithful, from everlasting to everlasting.