(Originally written at my livejournal)
First: I’m about eighteen, in the last throes of my career as a Teen Evangelist ™, and am spending two weeks in the Dominican Republic on a mission trip with my church in Miami. We’re finished up our construction work and are headed home, spending a couple of days at a beach before we leave. We have a service in a tiny whitewashed chapel one night and spend almost the whole time singing worship song. We sing one song, about four lines long, over and over, fifteen or twenty times, harmonizing. We sing it so long that I don’t have to think about the words anymore; I feel instead of hear the voices wrapping and weaving over and around each other, suffusing the air of the chapel. Something in my heart loosens and bursts and breaks free and I feel it fly away into the dark island night.
Second: I’m twenty-three and in Italy for the first time with one of my best friends, who happens to look like a Botticelli. (I know this because we go to the Uffizi together and drink sparkling water at the rooftop cafe and she looks like all the pictures there). We stay at a pensione near the Florence Duomo and the San Lorenzo market and have gelato every day, sometimes twice a day, and we hold hands or link arms everywhere we go to prevent Italian men from just picking her up and carrying her away. We take a bus to Siena with two blonde Australian girls and dutifully visit the zebra-striped Duomo there, as the guidebook instructs us to. There are carvings and statues and paintings insides, of course, but unlike any of the other duomi we’ve seen, the arched ceiling isn’t covered with frescos but instead is painted deep blue and covered with golden stars. I get a crick in my neck looking up and I think about all the people who have worshipped here in the hundred of years this cathedral has stood. I think about the generations of workers who spent their lives building this dome, who never saw the end product of their labor, who did not neccesarily know they were creating a fascimile of heaven. Though I am not Catholic, I light a candle and kneel at a side altar and bow my head while trying to peek up through my eyelashes at the beautiful false stars.
Third: I’ve just turned thirty, am living in a nice green house in Seattle and have been wanting to write about an experience I had the second time I went to Italy for my online journal. I haven’t been able to find a way to write it and have sort of given up on the project, telling myself it doesn’t really matter if I write it or don’t write it. One day I am sitting on my bed working on something else on my laptop and all of a sudden I start to hear phrases of story I want to write, the truth I want to tell. After a couple seconds of befuddlement I open a new document and start writing them down. When I look up three or four hours have passed and my hands hurt from typing so quickly, and the bones and ligaments of the story are there in front of me, cursor blinking. I don’t know exactly what happened but over the next couple of weeks I am able to stitch skin and eyes and hair onto the story, and every time I read it I can feel its breathing under my ear.