Children of life are we

I remember a cold December night, maybe six years ago, maybe seven. She was tiny then, clad in puffy pink down, and the half-strung Christmas lights were strewn about the front yard. Tangled and chaotic, I recall thinking, as if they could somehow mirror the emotions within the adult of the vignette. Children playing at grown ups, guiding children. The webs we allow ourselves to be tangled in are complicated, and never-ending. Sometimes.

There was some kind of confusion over the keys. Time has washed away the specifics of it from the story in my mind. I remember volunteering to attempt to locate whatever was lost, but was superseded by this adult-child, and her need to be an important member of the cast. I remember watching her walk to the truck in her puffy pink youthfulness, the way she strode her big-kid stride to the driver's door and looked for something, some trinket, that was never there in the first place. I remember the feeling of all the let-down in the world crushing down on me that winter night, as I watched it all unfold, as if on my heart there was a harness, and the driver pulled the reigns tightly and all at once. As if somehow I could see the path ahead growing wild with weeds and falling off into the ocean, no caretaker to keep it up. How much heartache you will know, and even by the hands of the people you should trust, and feel comforted by.

It comes back to me like this, in waves, in inopportune moments when I'm looking into her green eyes, so deep that you can see yourself reflected down in the bottom, you can see the whole world looking back, as synapses fire and thoughts are bridged. It comes back to me, these tiny tragedies, and I am awestruck by how someone who has seen so much heartache, and so young, can be so loving and so brilliantly intuitive.

I sat there during the ridiculous ceremony, and we played rock, paper, scissors, and I put my arm above her on the back of the pew, and I knew. In my arms, it was the reflection of God I was cradling. And would that the reflection was as resolute in me. Someday.