Untethered

Perhaps I was too young, or young at heart. Still a child in how I understood the world, and even in these moments I try to reinstate that certainty.

I would go to the rebbetzins and plead promises, all fire and fury and desperation, believing the words of women could perhaps persuade G-d. Believing that there was some spell to be woven and wrought through tears over a kitchen counter that belonged to someone else, someone with a bit more self-assurances than I was ready to possess. I was naïve and wild, and I knew how to make a scene.

I haven’t gone to the graves in a while. This was another trick the rebbetzin taught me, when tradition stood stronger than my own conceptions of how the world worked, or at least how I walked within it. She taught me to go to the graves, to the pillars and stone that outlasted far many more trials than mine, and still drew a crowd. She taught me the prayers to say and the words to write, but I am headstrong and never once kept to the script. The liturgy was a gateway to my personal prayers, things more magnanimous than I had any right to ask for (or, perhaps that I had every right to ask for – wouldn’t G-d himself want us to fight back with all the fire he gave us?) And I was convinced, this was my role in things.

I would claim tokens. The sideways glance of a smile, snippets of someone else’s conversation that held relevance in my mind, these were all signs. And if relevance existed on this deeper level, perhaps I could also affect things from this space. Weave my own workings, regain the confidence the last six years have stolen. Repair the wounded faith friends once relished within me. I think I’ve nearly done it.

I lose track of time, convinced within the knowledge that anything is possible, anything at all. Which means I don’t believe in impossible things anymore.

Tell me. Tell me that when the world falls sideways, perhaps one day a woman will cry over my kitchen counter with the same conviction that I once cried over hers.

Tell me that miracles are the most stable thing in this world.

Tell me that if it’s true, we’ve become untethered. Let loose from the rules we didn’t need anyway, to run free and wild. My grandmother ran that way – perhaps that’s why I went to her gravestone to start with. Perhaps that’s the better part of the legacy she left us, to live as wild women.

Come closer. I’ll tell it to you…