I want god to be in the room
No love if it's not looming
Nancy has decided she’ll only marry if there are stained glass windows; we all concure. I haven’t told anyone I love them for two years, I’ve only come close. But my god I know I’ve said the words before because they’re carved in my throat. They came out so powerfully it was like cartoons running through a wall, like a shadow burnt into a pavement after a blast, like a hit so harsh it ripped. If I swallow when I cry it stings the outline of the I. If I lie about feelings it burns the you, and the you, and the you, and all of them, you too.
But still there’s a note in my phone titled simply, “Wedding??” I added the question marks some time last year because I didn’t know if I wanted it but now I know it’s a need. Not to be with someone; not a desperation to be paired up and packaged off. But the day I added the bullet point that just read, “scary”, I knew the commitment couldn’t be any less. No “I do” without the light filtering through blood red and jewel blue. Nothing around my finger unless it feels heavy.
I want god to be in the room when I promise. I want a knot around us. I want an intimidating air to break when we kiss, feel winded and worried and ultimately awed in the terrified excitement; smiling like devils in the face of risk. A fall into something, clinging to each other. Big eyes watching over, both of us feeling the stare.
I think I want to cut my hand and hold the wound on theirs. My red, their red, now ours. Know that the merging means something even if that’s something scary, even if it’s something doomed. Believe that somewhere spiritual, something shakes, something stirs, and something is changed.
I felt the ground shift like that once one day in Heeley, tripping on acid. Neither of us could stop from looking in each others eyes and I swear I felt it physically like a kiss on my pupil. We both cried when we touched and I got scared, curled up in the corner begging to die together. Tomorrow felt evil, today felt like forever – I tried to orchestrate a suicide pact like the inevitable comedown was the Capulets, the work to be done the Montagues, and us; so in love we’d rather hang out in heaven just so we could hang out. He told me I was killing the vibe, he was right. But he kissed me again, he circled the day on his calendar as something special to remember and I woke up the next morning next to him, laughing at breakfast about how I would’ve died for love over the cause of rebelling against an early Monday shift.
We nearly got matching tattoos in York once and when we split, I only wished we had more. I’ve never got out of heartbreak without mourning for proof that love was there in more than photos to hide now and necklaces to not wear. I want a name scored into my skin and to know mine goes with them on theirs. I don’t want to block them online, I want to know for certain I will know when they die and someone will tell them if I go first. I will be thought of in the future. I will be a face they will recall like I could sketch every one of theirs blind, because it was important. Because it was love and because that means something.
I saw a video online of a girl who was named after her father’s first love, and I scrolled until I found comments that agreed it was beautiful. I saw photos of a staircase; A poet so in love he wove his wife’s footsteps, tracing wet up the stairs post shower, into the carpet. I saw a hand binding ceremony at Glastonbury; both their eyes shut, feeling the rope knot, their hands tighter and tighter around the other’s wrist until all that skin probably feels like one – that’s when you’re married. All of it made sense. At some point, I heard ‘Plainsong’ by The Cure and added it to the note along with blue shoes, the women I love’s birth flowers in a bouquet.
Sometimes I dream about sitting in a circle with my best friends, all hand in hand, eyes closed, calling something into the room. There’s a photo of us sprawled out in my old living room, reading each other’s tarot cards and I think about it a lot; seeing it as an artefact of the day we all fell in love harder; the spirits watching over, locking us into it.
I think of the day I bumped into Beth on the high street a few days after we met. I think about the sheer chance of Sophie, us sitting in a doctors office waiting room for a first hang out; the way something seemed to move to make openness inescapable. I think about James put in the room opposite mine. I think about Dale, the job interview that changed his life being the same that bettered mine. I think about my grandparents rollerskating in a park as two strangers, the way their slow movement from enemies to friends to life-long lovers let my mum meet my dad in a club, how only because her friend spoke to his friend that it let my sister be born, be smart, be a teacher, meet another teacher and let my niece be here. I think of all the books I’ve been bought that shaped the entire course of my life that I’ll later pass down to others as essential keys to know me. I think of the albums, I think of the experiences; all allowed to happen by the happening of a connection and surely none of them accidents unless we can honour accidents as holy in some way.
“The loss of the spiritual dimension of love,” Shon Faye discussed on some podcast and my ears pricked up – yes. “Secular consumer capitalism is very bleak and there is a missing dimension,” she says, and the missing thing is a kind of higher up responsibility. It’s the levelling up away from the selfishness of desire and of wanting, of the vanity of trying to appeal, of the flimsiness of words into the weight of vows. It's an audience watching that is often only felt in the grandiose, the melodramatic, the godliness. In the spotlight of something bigger, something markedly bigger, there is a solidity to the promise – I imagine, or, I hope. It’s more than a planned day and a booked venue. It’s more than a valentines day card. It’s more than a compliment. It's an honouring of a bigger reason, a bigger deal – an honouring of the simple fact that any two people on this planet coming together, knowing each other to the bone, gifting each other the richest word our language has ever come up with to express the feeling, it means something, something bigger than a hinge match, a name on a list, an old phone number, a discarded letter, a photo in an Instagram archive. “There is a spiritual function of love,” she says, and I believe it, I’ve seen it, I only want it if it’s within it.