Miracles I Will Never See

or, how to pray for impossible things while listening to Winter op 8 no 4 in f minor

a man who calls himself vagabond wrote these words and disappeared...

Today we will go to the place where we fell in love. To the fact of the facsimile of the place we dreamed about, lost in those stacks of books so long ago. When our hearts were still clean of pain and so proud of what we might become.

We will go to where I will fall in love with you again, over and over, like crashing down a mountain, gathering steam and giving myself over to the terrible rush of air and the hammer of the sharp stones and jutting roots.

Today, I will not be alone in the brittle, silver cold. Drinking gut rot in an empty dive bar. Counting the dead beats of my heart until the new year. Today I will go to the technicolor stone alleys and the perfume of rising yeast and pungent cheese. I will lose myself in the eternal illumination of la Ville Lumière with the woman who lit in me the love this city lays claim to.

We will spend those first few days wandering the bouquinistes lining the dark pulse of the Seine, eating roasted chestnuts out of newspaper cones, returning to your beloved Marais to buy desert perfumes, visiting the graves of Sartre and de Beauvoir, and hoarding books from the shops by the Sorbonne.

Wandering the arterial streets, shimmering and glazed with morning mist, corroded with the unending vitality of people, and around every corner, something ancient alloyed with modernity. A juxtaposition of time and place pendulating between yesterday and today, now and forever.

Here there is beauty, and here there is blight. Somewhere, we are crushed in the throng of wide-eyed tourists clamoring for the music of the long-silent bells of Notre Dame. Elsewhere, we are alone, the clip of our shoes the only rhythms sounding in the cold silence of streets paved with the dreams of centuries of art and literature and love, yes, the word that now sleeps like a stone in our mouths—sharp, soiled, impossible to swallow—we will make a fine and long meal of it here. ​​​​​​

We will plunge into a black dawn on a train to Colmar—the town of Beauty and the Beast—bulleting towards a swelling pastel horizon. A haze will devour the light and obscure the distant green contours of pastoral countryside being slowly torn away by a sun trying with all its fangs to puncture the grey scrim of clouds.

And we will walk with misted breath through the cobbled streets and greenery hyaline with shimmering ice. Through a luminous, labyrinthian sprawl of vendors selling all manner of sweet and delicate delights. A cacophony of sights and smells that will trip us giddy with joy.

We will warm our hands and bellies with mugs of mulled cider, sharp with ginger and clove, and spitted meats shaved into warm, crusty bread and slathered with melted cheese.

Meander for hours through the canal-edged streets wreathed in Christmas decorations and sun-kissed lights—this world that is perpetually rejoicing in the bright splendor of christmas glee—and your feet will become so frozen that we will have to find you a thicker pair of socks, and you will take off your shoes in the middle of the square, near the mime who speaks only to tell you you look like a famous french actress, and I will take your feet in my hands, and rub them and warm them with my breath, not even considering my long held disgust at touching another person's foot, because it is your foot and it is perfect and cold and I will love you deeper again and I will realize that every time I believe there is no further to fall, there is revealed another ledge of loving you to leap from.

And that is only where we begin. Days later, we will go to Sainte-Chapelle and sit in the ancient cathedral of endless stained glass commissioned by the monk king to hold Christ’s crown of thorns. We will listen to the manic violin of Vivaldi’s Winter op 8 no 4 in f minor, and I, nearly breathless in the trembling, yellow candle light, will reach for your icy hand, and it will feel like being saved from drowning.

We will walk home drunk on music and wine, and the world will take the shape of our two silhouettes wandering the streets, electric with life and bursting with a carnival of lights.

Some days later, we will drive south to Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and the grotte Sainte-Marie Madeleine, where Mary Magdalene came with Lazarus and spent long years in prayer after the crucifixion.

We will walk the king’s path through the sacred forest, following the dark moss, under the ancient oaks and pines, until the final rocky climb of brittle stone stairs, past calvary and into the sudden revelation of the cave’s dark mouth.

We will enter the carved-out temple on the top of the mountain, a place holding so reverentially the faith of man and nature in one single stony hand. Step into the candlelit dark, pungent with temple incense and musty dampness, the quiet echoes of water falling into invisible pools, and the whispered prayers of pilgrims in the dark like a lullaby.

And I will rip a page from my notebook and scribble a prayer of my own, adding it to the pile of crumpled faith. One paper-thin hope unanswered, as you remain as far today as Mary from her savior for her 30 years in solitude.

But in that time, in that place, in that descent down the mountain, I will reach for your forever-frozen hand again, and you will be there, and I will be there, and I will believe in so many miracles I will never see.