Epitaph
“Perhaps my epitaph would read: “Here lies she who wandered.”
To you who have found the glimmers of your shining dreams, you who have discovered the bedrock of your futures… congratulations.
I doubt you will ever understand that the faith that made you strong, that completes the honorable part of you - that same faith that changed your life and reconstructed your jaded spirit from the rubble you cast it on a long time ago - was not enough to make me stay.
It wasn’t enough to keep me; not strong enough to convince me.
I miss you. I miss the old days of love and freedom. I miss your friendship and the color you once brought to the life I used to love… But you never made me complete… You brought me my greatest joy and my happiest days, but you never brought me peace.
And though I miss you, you must understand that I will never return to you. You are a part of my past and I will love you always. This torch inside me will always burn for you and the memories we shared. You will always be the one who tempted me and will forever tempt me to believe in Jesus the way they say we should.
But my faith will always be different from yours. Yours may be clearer and more specific, but mine doesn’t hold Him down with boundaries and definitions.
Nevertheless… my heart will always yearn for you. In sudden unexpected moments, when my memories of you would be crystal clear, I would wish that things had been different… That perhaps I should have been more accepting of the faith we were offered. That I shouldn’t have left and become the wanderer I am now. That I should have been less afraid of what I would feel for you had I stayed.
You would still be my friend. We would have gone through the same trials together. We would have discovered that innate strength that changed us, together…
But you’ve found your strength. I’ve found mine. Your mentor is a great man, mine is the world outside the one we used to know. With every wrong turn, you were corrected and remade, whereas I kept moving blindly until the walls closed in around me and I had to fight back to keep breathing.
If my faith had been different, I would have cast it away and distrusted it forever. But as it is, it cannot be taken away from me. It is too wide and too encompassing, it is impossible to be rid of it.
But in the contrariness of my thoughts and the waywardness of my ways, I have found what to me is true. I have found a place that I can stand on, something that shifts with the tide, but is always real.
I do not expect you to understand. I don’t understand you and it doesn’t bother me. I just wanted to reach out and say, “Hey.” Before I walk away.
