Fusion

Dear God,

You who formed me and who knew me throughout every period of my life, who saw me as I gurgled and played and sucked at the breast, who watched me grow and transform my toybox into a spaceship, who witnessed my impotent fury in the shape of my bully and the subtle savagery of my high school administration, who has seen me hate You, then come close to You, then rage at you again, who has indeed given me a gift of this rage...as it is my passion that allows me to walk at all...what shall we say now?

You listened to my prayer. I can't tell You what that means to me, to know that I was heard and answered precisely as I requested. You knew what I could and could not stand and You decided I had had enough exactly when I called to You and insisted upon the same. And now I stand before the threshold of the entrance to Your glory and You will come to dwell upon my marriage canopy. And Heshy and I will look up and behold of the radiance of Your countenance and we will feel glad and small simultaneously. For You are Awesome and yet you are loving and it is in You and with You that we commune. It is no coincidence, the day that we are marrying- the day when we first discussed You.

I love that You matched us so perfectly well. I love that he comes from a background utterly different from mine, that I can walk new vistas and new worlds with him. I love his stubbornness and pride and commitment to truth. I love that he found me on his own. I love that he loves You.

And I'm awaiting the fusion. There can be no joining of the physical without a union of souls, which is why the soul mourns so long and grievously for those they lose. You have caused me to grieve and you know I still do and perhaps I always shall because with each friend we form, with each loss we endure, we lose a little piece of our souls. But then you made Heshy. And you gave him a great and impossible grace, an ability to restore my soul to me and make it resemble a whole one once more. The broken pieces remain because without them, I would not be as You had shaped me and my life would not have been one worth its living. You made him clever with his needle and supple with the weft and loom so that he would be able to knit me back together and cause me to live again.

It was You who granted him to me and thus it is You that I must thank and to whom I should address the outpouring of my soul. You are the God of my tradition, my religion, my parents, forefathers, life and soul and you decided that Heshy and I should join together in order to become something more than we are when apart. My soul is both afraid of and thrilled by the prospect of rejoining its match...my soul longs always, for that is how You created me, yearning. If I did not want, if I did not hunger, if I ceased to wish for that which is not yet, I would not be me. And while there is much good that comes of this, there is some evil as well, and that I must work on in order to rectify.

What is clear, though, is that this prospect of fusion, this terrifying and fascinating way in which the soul and body return to one another and become lovers once more, is one of the greatest gifts that You can give and it is one that is special and shall be treasured. My soul has always wished to be complete and now it can be (inasmuch as my soul can ever be) and in that lies a great and terrible beauty, a path so mysterious that I cannot fathom it.

Thank You for your compassion and for hearing me and please bless us to follow You in accordance to Your way and afford us the clarity of vision to know right from wrong and to learn how to repent fully for the harms and wrongs we have done each other and humanity at large.

An echo of a forgotten thought for You, God, if slightly bitter: "I hope I love You all my life."

And I hope you teach me peace and contentment and joy with the life You have chosen to give me. For you know, as Frost did:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I hope that now I can begin to become acquainted with sunshine. Heshy lights the darkness in my soul; he offers joy where I set a table of despair. My sweetmeats are made of sadness and his are of love; my bread and water is melancholy whereas his is gladness. I hope he saves me from the dark for a long time yet and I hope as well that You enable me to be worthy of him. May I illuminate his life as he does mine; may we be phosphorus to one another's fire. And may I love him. Amen.