These are the holiest days of the year.
I don’t know how.
I don’t know how to talk to G-d this way. We’re close, he and I. We share second and third cups of coffee. Prayers from the kitchen floor, down on my knees. Sometimes I tell him I surrender. Sometimes I beg forgiveness for the stupid shit I say. “A great shofar sounds, a still small voice is heard. Angels rush forward and are held by trembling; here is the Day of Judgement.” I never really liked the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. I don’t know how to talk to G-d like this, through conversations draped in so much formality.
My best dress, made of lace. It doesn’t quite fit, and it doesn’t quite fit me. Somebody asked me if I work for the synagogue. I just like it here. Last year, someone asked if I work as a gravedigger.
It didn’t feel like New Year’s, I’ll confess that much. Couldn't touch the reverence of it. We said the same sacred things, at least I did. But I pray best through a hammer and a bottle of spray paint. If my mother prayed this year, she did it through a port and a chemo drip.
Thank G-d for the port and the chemo drip.
G-d forgive me.
Day of Judgement, "On Rosh Hashanah it is written...” We did it dancing. That part of the service made more sense to me than anything. That, when faced with divine judgement we greeted it with joyous dancing, even without knowing the outcome of anything.
That much faith.
That much joy in community.
That much certainty that 12pm here is 11am back in Texas. I daven best dancing. She was receiving chemo even as I did it.
We have a prayer that we say each week for the sick. A prayer that must also coincide with her appointments. Every other week.
I got caught in the rain again. I was trying to make it down to the river; it’s a good place to go when the world is too big. It meant I could take off the lace. Leave my shoes in the shul lobby and walk the new floorboards barefoot.
That was when I felt it. In the final moments, as the sun was setting. The thing I needed most: to put my sopping shoes back on and just leave last year to the torrents.
That much something.
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