A Picture of God
She said she wanted to take a picture of God; lying face up, in the middle of a field named nowhere, on the greenest patch of scorched grass we could find. The summer heat had burnt most of the green from the ground, but late at night, once the dew set in, it felt fine. She held her eye to the camera and her camera to the sky, her blonde hair pooling around her face like gold silk, covering the exact moment when she starts to cry.
I hold my breath. Believing for a second that maybe she’ll see him, maybe she’ll get the shot. Maybe she’ll come home with a photo that will change the world, leave even believers shocked. Only clouds pass, nothing very grand, no heavenly voices or glowing outstretched hands. It’s just me, her, the silence, and the sky. Holding up cameras and trying not to cry.
Somewhere across the field a tree stirs, and another, the wind sweeps the unkempt grass into waves. Brittled by the heat, the sea churns and a bird whistles her name. Goosebumps in a heat wave, she smiles, and sits up straight. Her eyes, glazed with tears and tea, she turns and looks at me. Smile, she says, and clicks the camera a couple times. Laughing, she just stares into my eyes.
On the highway home she sings along with every song and somehow it makes me feel more alone. Her sudden smile has me feeling weighted beneath my worry, though I know it’s wrong. I think two times about telling her, but once the right words come along, she finds another melody, and it’s instantly our song. So I keep my mouth shut and drive, concentrate on keeping the tears out of my eyes; and kept searching for god in the dark skies.
By the time we reach her place she has lost herself completely to space, and I wonder if she still knows I’m there. The night is wearing thin, I can smell morning in the air, when she asks me if I want to come in. I tell her no, though my real answer surely shows, as she ignores me and takes my hand. You have to understand, she says, why I took the picture when I did, the image I realized I had.
At our best, we are what we want our Gods to be, empathetic, understanding, immune to jealousy, but time grinds us down. Slowly for some, but it surely works its way around. We aren’t all devils every day, we all fall victim to our demons at different times, in different ways, but make no mistake, we are all somehow the same; something no geography, nor language, nor color of skin could ever change.
The picture I got was of God, of the many faces He finds and the shapes She takes, you were God, just to be found sitting with me in that place. Maybe there is some faceless stranger hiding in the sky, waiting for the moment we finally get off this ride, but I prefer to seek God through people’s eyes; through this strange arrangement of events we call our lives. It’s the one of the few places, I’ve found, that anything that beautiful could ever hope to survive.
