divinity holds my hand

a time capsule memory of every little thing I'm grateful for

the other side - dean cromwell

I want to get vulnerable for a second. It’s harder to write about gratitude than grief because to write about gratitude, I have to look God in the eye. Sometimes “thank you” feels more vulnerable than “I love you.” It is easy to write around pain because describing the shadow paints a picture of what has cast it. It is hard to write about joy because joy is a light that casts no shadow.

Sunlight is peeking down at me through the leaves of the trees and the warmth makes me grab at its rays. I am trying to hold a moment in a time capsule; I am trying to cram a memory into a jar, but the memory itself is more a container than something to be contained, so I stuff the memory with the emotion, instead. There is a light I am trying to hold in my fist.

I go to CVS because I have a cold and, in my half-delirious state, buy a bottle of cough drops that end up being $15. I think it’s ridiculous for such a small bottle to cost so much (and my cough stays for another week even after taking them), but maybe neither of those facts mean anything when I remember how lucky it is that I no longer have to check the price tags on cough drops before buying them.

Just a year ago, I got a rash on my arm and refused to see a doctor for weeks because I knew my insurance wouldn’t cover it. In the corner of my living room, one of my roommates had put a shoe box over a dead rat so we didn’t have to look at it. Its corpse stayed there for a week, until eventually her boyfriend got back from his trip and threw the rat out for us. When the rash finally got bad enough I had to see a doctor, she told me it was likely due to “unclean living conditions” and prescribed me a cream. I never went to pick it up.

I got the call back for a job mid-September and signed the lease for a new apartment two weeks later. Everything fit neatly into the back of the smallest U-Haul truck; my room in the apartment had been a storage closet before the owner decided to rent the property. The night before I left, my roommate and I ordered Pad Thai and watched Netflix on a television precariously balanced on a stool.

“I’m really happy for you,” she told me, popping open a bottle of Moscato, “I really think it’s going to be a good year for you.”

The first night in my new apartment, I slept on the floor. My bed frame and mattress had been delayed in delivery (I had decided to splurge on new furniture to celebrate), but it makes for a better metaphor if I say I laid on the floor because I could lie on the floor now without worrying about rats. The city lights flittered between the sills of my window curtain and I pretended the flickering of high-rise buildings were stars.

A week later, I held a housewarming in my apartment. Music played directly from my phone and my friends made jokes about how I still didn’t have a speaker. Two large pizzas were spread across my table-meant-for-one and we mixed each other drinks from our potluck of bottles. “This is such a nice location,” one of my friends commented, “and your living room is so nice. I could see myself doing work here.” Before she left, I gave her my door code.

In therapy, I tell my therapist I feel good. “My job pays the bills, my manager likes me, and I don’t feel too tired,” I tell her, “but I always feel scared that when things are going well, it means something bad will happen, soon.”

My therapist tells me to write lists. Every week, three things to be grateful for. I scribble my gratitude on random post-it notes around my apartment. If you cannot hold onto light, you can at least hold onto words, she says. If I cannot hold onto these blessings, I can at least trace their outline with my pen.

Here’s a laundry list of everything I am grateful for: (1) Today the sky is so blue it makes colors seem imaginary. I don’t know if I believe in any God, but I still feel the touch of something holy. (2) My manager lets me go home seventeen minutes early when he sees me in awe of the sky. (3) When I get home, someone is already sitting in my living room. There are people who know my door code combination by heart. There is love in that muscle memory.

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