Heaven stretches before me like a basketball court, with its white lines, metal rims, and a judgment day as hot as black asphalt. My soles slap sweaty on tar, on wood like rose thorns, and the sinews beneath the stripped vines reach out to me, visible and cold from the layers peeled away.
I watch you like he watches me, full of faith and unabashed in the face of fear. God knows no man, I've told myself. God loves no man, I've convinced myself. And my veins shine pale underneath milky glass, and I wonder where along this line of life did I convince myself that I could do this on my own. I spent years searching for these exact same hills, gave up family and love all for curves sweeter than a woman and the richest sort of green. In my memory, it ran thick beneath my feet and crushed crisp between my fingertips. But now that I'm here, it's become a desert to me, the valley no longer cradled and no rolling ground before me. I see only the scar of a burning mountain, a ghost of a Pacific coast, a grave where God used to be, the lie I had come to believe.
But I still mourn for the land that I loved and the life it will never give me, and all that I abandoned for it, and everything that could have stayed the same, the living thing whose breath I took away, and how I'll never know what could have been if I had never left, and how I'll never know if it would have been better if I had never come back, and all the days that I spent wanting something that I was thought was gone, and how long it took me to accept that it was something that never was. All the life inside of it was something I had made for it
the lie I had come to believe.