Splendid Ignorance

2011

A void isn't emptiness. It isn't an entity. It is an unreality. It is an absence of something that will consume it and fill it up. Space is called a void. Perhaps it is simply that according to scientific jargon. I see it as an ill-defined word. My life was a void, but it wasn't empty. Not entirely. At present, it felt empty, but it was full of the past. I needed something else to overshadow that past.

I had become a Christian and deep down I knew that God had filled the void in my heart and soul. However, as the years passed, my faith had become like seed on the soil. The birds of the air did not get all of them. Some of the seeds took root or else it all would have simply ended. Yet, as the years passed, my spiritual focus waned and I again turned my eyes elsewhere to define myself.

Flora eclipsed the memory of Darcey. She came in and I let her presence consume the past with the present and fill up the newly created void I had developed. 'He must have loved me, oh so much to send me someone as fine as you', Dylan sang, and while I gave God the credit, I obsessed on the object of the blessing and not the Giver of it.

In my mind, the rainbow in the sky over the parking lot on campus was the symbol of Darcey's relationship officially ending. Of course, if we had rekindled our relationship it probably would have been a symbol of promise. Doubly-so since it was a double rainbow. I just didn't realize it until Flora and I had our first true date in the spring of 1991 that it was actually a symbol of promise and hope. It was good. I proposed to Flora a month after our first date and we were married five months after that in August. It was simple.

To think of my wife in a coma was like a bad dream. A nightmare. A plot twist that wasn't meant to be. It certainly should be rewritten. She should wake up and we should continue on as we were. Living our life. But to me, sitting in the hospital chapel, that was wishful thinking as well as my hope was in a miracle from God. Both seemed like fairy tales.

I hated to admit that. I had once burned with a passion for God. I had clearly seen His hand in my life. Even now, in my struggling belief, I knew He was the only one that could straighten this mess up. But the more I acknowledged that, the more I hardened my heart and turned my thoughts to what I would do rather than turn any control over to somebody else. Even if that person was God Himself. He could work miracles like with Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones. However, I had taken it upon myself to dig up my own dead, dry bones of the past and was contemplating how I could put flesh back on them. If I were honest, I knew they would just be clothed in the rotting flesh of a corpse, my own personal Frankenstein. Except in my madness, I felt I had power that could be expected to raise them to some semblance of life. That was where my mind was at, but I never tried to contemplate if I believed I could be able to embrace whatever it was I created.

I pulled out of my wallet a slip of paper and unrolled it. It was worn to the point of threatening to tear at any moment. I held it lovingly and carefully unfolded it, looking at the words that were printed on it. The words were faded and barely discernible. I didn't have to look at the paper to remember the words, but I did anyway. Reading them over and over.

A chance meeting with someone from the past is in store.

It seemed prophetic. I almost believed it was, but I could only guess at the nature of the prophet. And in the neutered chapel to no one in particular I said one word aloud. "Darcey."