when words have meaning again and the meaning is sweet.

I can’t go through this again, I said, suddenly serious.

Yes, you could, my friend Christian told me, just as serious.

No, it’d kill me. I can’t, I just can’t, I kept repeating.

No, you’d get through it. Just like you get through all of life, he assured me.

And then I told him I’d kill myself, but neither of us really believed it. Because I wouldn’t, but still.

We were talking about me and marriage and whoa. I know that might sound crazy, but it’s me we’re talking about here; and in case you don’t know, I talk about everything. Well, with some people, anyway.

And when I talk about marriage in the case of me, I generally say if while my friends say when. And when I asked Christian how weird–on a scale of one to ten-he thinks my life is, we both decided on twenty (at least) and then started laughing.

Because, seriously. Who would have thought? I still shock people quite regularly by giving them an outline of the recent events of my life. As in: I’m single now. S-I-N-G-L-E. Yes, I know he seemed like he was “really on fire for the Lord,” as one person recently put it, but well, things didn’t work out, anyway.

And the thing is, they don’t even know the half of it.

Just like me. At least, the way it was for a long time.

But now I know the whole of it and I’m grateful to be out of it. And I’d rather feel a little lonely sometimes when I am all by myself, then very lonely when I am with somebody who claims to be a husband.

I like this feeling, lately. I think it might be peace. Isn’t that a beautiful word? And what makes it beautiful is the concept behind it. Because sure, the e and the a sitting so close, making a nice, strong and two-letter-deep sound that neither of them could make very well on their own doesn’t hurt either, but I love the word because of what it stands for.

And you could talk to me about peace for hours and hours; we could even watch a movie chronicling peace that Quentin Tarantino himself made, but if it’s not something that’s in my heart, I guess I’d lose interest or stop believing after a while.

Because eventually it’d be like randomly saying peace to the soldiers marching in Pickett’s Charge in Gettysburgh while all their friends are getting shot down around them. War is obvious in the cadence of their marching, always marching, towards an end that is not necessary; not if this world were the way God dreamt it, I think. But I guess it’s the way we wheel and deal our free will as if we’re peddlers, each of us with an angle, each of us with a gimmick and a jingle to keep them coming back, even if it’s a place that hurts rather than heals. I suppose that is what makes war necessary sometimes. But God, I wish it weren’t.

But if you’re saying peace over and over again in the midst of all that, the word starts to mean nothing.

Which is what the word trust became for me. Nothing. But I kept hearing it; he’d even get upset with me for not holding fast to it, but there I was, watching everything fall down around me. Wondering at the secrecy. At the lack of communication. The lack of care. The lack, the lack, the lack.

And now it all makes a kind of sad sense. But the sadness is trailing behind, I think, in this race for my heart, while the sense of freedom is maybe pulling ahead now. And certain words that had lost their meaning in my life are once again conceptualizing right before my eyes.

Trust.
Peace.
Love.
Forgiveness.

And I find myself loving those words like they are family itself. I gather them close to me, holding them with the kind of urgency that spells out to the world that I’m not afraid for anybody to know how much I need them.

Because God, I need them to mean something and it’s because of God, I think, that once again, they do.

Well, God and people.

Some of the best darn people in the world, I think.