Words from Jesus.

I was barely able to understand the Words when the pastor: my father told me that Jesus was G-d and G-d was Jesus and they are The Same.

And I looked at his eyes behind his square glasses and I sat on his flannel-shirt lap and I did not understand.

I am twenty.

I am draped in a purple sweater and green rain jacket with a hood over my long hair and fan-shaped ears.

Brendan is a prophet.  The real macoy.

It is then I realize that I didn't believe in it before this.

And he holds up his hands toward heaven in the spirit-charged Druid burial ground village and tells me I will be a Sender - like the bow for the arrow.  The string that pulls taunt.  The hand holding the archer's tool belt.  The Sender.  Not the one who is sent.

And I search like old shoe laces fresh from the now-dented dryer for the thing the people all around me call
My Purpose but I can't find it

Reaching up into far-thrown nothingness.

No whispers.

No horse-tails.

No chasing.

Just blank canvases.  Blinking cursors.  Other people's purposes.  Never my own.

And I am twenty-five and

I peel away layers of old skin like sick lizards or the dead one in the aquarium at my best friend's sleepover in the fourth grade
(we buried him ceremoniously in the toilet of the guest bathroom and cried about it)
and peel again and again and again and instead of freshness I feel like bleeding and grope with calloused hands I never found beautiful at new wounds and aching,
old scars

Feels like
itching - primal and wet and hot steaming life baths and I lay there
alone on the cold floor of the bathroom and hear G-d speak to me.
This Jesus/G-d,

Beauty.  He says.

He whispers soft on cat slipper feet.

He whispers like a little girl I knew with honey curls and a silver-green dress.  Patton-leather shoes.

Beauty.  Is your purpose.

But I am a heaping Nothing in a bloody nightgown on the bathroom floor:  something
to be washed.
Dirty... a vile
Creature...

And He laughs because He sees through me.