Weary Little Star

Dear Levi,

I saw Santana tonight at church, but I didn’t see you. I even looked, though I kept telling myself to stop. You weren’t in your normal spot. It kind of scared me, the feeling of losing you in the crowd… losing you for good into this vast country, this vast life. I was so sick and I kept coughing and had a blanket wrapped around me, but I didn’t know where you were and it bothered me more. I wish I could have just seen a glimpse of your sweet face. I am glad I at least saw your car, to know you are okay enough to be in church. Where did you go?

This week has been so hard, being sick, the kind of sickness that just continues on and on and never seems to end. I just want to feel better, and yet my mind can’t convince my body for follow the plan. I think I miss you even more this week, being so ill, than when I was stronger physically.

Remember the story about the baked potato you once told me? You showed me on google maps the route you would run around your little town, and how your coach wouldn’t let you run on the track because you ran so much he was afraid it would be bad for you. So you ran around the town, and when you got home, you would eat a baked potato.

I don’t know why, but that story was in my head this week. Maybe because there was a baked potato bar at the OU game get together the Crossbearers class had on Saturday. Or maybe because I’ve set out a schedule to start running. But all I know is, there are big tears spurting in my eyes when I think about the way you would say potato, with your funny little lisp that I could never quite figure out if it was just an accent or just the way you pronounce your words. And all I can think is the profile picture you used to have on FB in your maroon running clothes, the look of potential in your beautiful brown eyes, the way the sunlight caught your hair. And I miss you so badly, it’s like the pain cuts deeper and deeper into my chest. How deep can it go?

I haven’t heard from GiGi in two months. Like Davina, I am afraid that she has given up on me. It makes me so sad, I was crying in the shower thinking about her and all the people I’ve lost. All because of the stupid choices I made. All because of how I treated you. I lost it all. I lost everything that mattered, everyone that mattered, all I dreamed of.

Will I never get a second chance? Is there no such thing in life as second chances?

I know I don’t deserve one. I can’t even fathom what that would even feel like. After church tonight, I drove through the darkness and could barely even breathe. It was like the weight of the greif, of the hopelessness, was crushing my chest, my lungs. Like if I flinched, I would just break down and never recover.

I drove to South Grand Boulevarde, to that miserable little park, and looked out over the field again, at the glower Devon Tower that I hate. And I prayed… I prayed for you, for your mom and Forrest and sissy, for GiGi, I payed… I cried a little, but the pain was too sharp, too scary to really break down. I was afraid I would never be able to get back up again.

Am I crazy? Sometimes I wonder. Why else would a girl be sitting in a car in the dark in a park on the south side of Oklahoma City recalling a night over ten months before, a boy she knew for just a few brief months, and a love that was written off? You moved on so easily. Why can’t I? Why is it my soul is so restless and wandering through the darkness of night, searching for peace, unable to find it?

It was a small comfort to be at the park, to remember, but not very much. Mostly, I just wanted somewhere quiet to pray. And in that place, where my last and maybe greatest failure is memorialized in the silence of endless time… I just wanted to pray. To pray, and pray, and beg God to change me.

Have I really changed? I’ve been trying so hard. So hard, Levi. What good is the effort? I don’t know how to judge the change because I don’t see any results. All I see is that fact that you don’t love me, still, don’t want me, still, and don’t think of me, anymore. All I know is that a year has almost passed and nothing has changed. Not one thing.

Why, God? What am I doing wrong? What am I supposed to do?

I want to give up. I’m not going to lie. As I sit here, sick to the bones, weary to my soul, coughing and tears streaming and throat burning, I just want to go outside into the darkness and find a body of water to lie down and disappear into the depths. I just want to see the liquid close over my head and say goodnight to the world. I just want to find that little bliss of heaven, that peace that doesn’t ever end. I am so, so, so weary.

But I can’t give up. If I give up, who ever won’t? And you deserve me to keep trying. You deserve more than me giving up because it’s been so long, so hard, so lonesome, so silent. You deserve better. I’m just so afraid you’ll never care. What if you never, ever care? Never notice? What if one day you really do slip away into the crowd and I never see you again? What if you keep me blocked on Facebook forever? What if there is no such thing as second chances? What if?

In that case… I just want to lie down tonight and sleep with the memories. Of the boy who ran, of the boy who lived off baked potatoes in a family that didn’t take care of him, of a boy who inspired me, who touched my heart, who made me realize how precious and utterly priceless he was. A boy who I can never forget, never get over. And I will just lay down tonight and cry and kick myself for losing him, for treating him like I did, for every single mistake that haunts my mind each hour. I will just lay down tonight, and pretend. Pretend it never happened. Or pretend I died that night he walked away, that I’m not really living through this torture. And just reminisce of the stories he told me, of the lisp in his words as he spoke them, and the precious soul of whom he revealed.

I miss you, Levi. I miss you more and more each day.

God, please bring him back. Please give me a second chance. Please.

Your star,

Your broken, weary, lonely little star,

Rigel

Roadway

Dear Levi,

I lost my voice completely as the infection moved from my throat and ears down into my lungs. Not even a whisper, a whimper, a sound. I showed up to work speechless, literally, unsure what to do. Brad laughed and then looked so sorry for me. He found doc work I would help out with, so I spent the morning boring through legal paperwork highlighting policies that would be beneficial for the new team members joining us on the floor this month, then shadowed a few calls with my neighbor, Heather, the streamline beast. I drank hot tea with spices and cream like my life depended on it, but my voice was gone without a trace of return. At noon, Brad shook my hand and sent me home for the day. I was useless at work.

Part of me was relieved. Although I feel better, I don’t feel like I’m dying and in pouring agony, I am aware my body is behaving strangely. I’m gaining weight, I still can’t sleep enough to push back the fatigue, and I have no appetite for anything except sugar. My voice just checked out on me. A weak, rattling cough is working its way into my chest. And I find my attention wandering, especially in the morning getting ready for work. I stand in front of my closet and look for a comforting mix of corderou and cashmere and… I get lost in thought about nothing until my alarm blares I’m late for work. Again.

I drove home not the least bit sleepy but so very tired in my head. I knew I would go straight to bed and try to kick this infection once for all.

Along the drive, I crossed into the airport district and the rolling hills made the ride more fun. I loved this part, right next to home. To my right, I passed the Warr Acres library I’d never noticed before, a Washington green structure of faded wood boards and cozy windows. To the left, the Forty Day for Change activist were camped on the edge of the road with their signs against abortion. I honked several times in support, and they waved at me.

The sunlight was streaming from an whimsical blue sky, white clouds like sheep on fields rolling across the vista. The trees were blowing merrily in the brisk breeze, laughing at the cars flashing by it seemed, shaking themselves in the vigor of autumn. The sunlight was perfect for the early afternoon, sweet and simple and restful as it splashed through my front window. KayLove played across the radio, and for a minute, I forgot I was sick.

A funny sight grabbed my attention. Up ahead, the road way was winding down the hill and through the trees and there were… papers in the road? White, curling papers freshly lost. Bouncing and swirling and skittering across the road for two blocks, leading the breeze on a merry chase as they pirouetted around the cars and spun circles in the air before landing gracefully on the curb. Hundreds of papers, sprinkled here and there down the road, like a fantastic trail of crumbs that led Hansel and Gretel home.

I wanted to stop and take a picture, but wasn’t sure the view would be the same from the side of the road. Standing in traffic to try to capture the merry little white sheets didn’t seem very prudent, either, so I just drove along, looking left and right, wondering what business man threw his brief case out the window in despair, or what office building lost a file out the window to the breeze, or what school child threw away their homework in cheery disregard.

I’d never seen anything like that, on this autumn day, with the big white clouds in the blue sky and trail of white papers dancing down the roadway ahead of me, leading back back to Lyrewood Lane. It was such a pretty picture, I wanted to share it with you. I hope, I hope, I hope, that today is a good day for you, sweet prince. I miss you here.

Your star,

Rigel

Music Ministries

Dear Levi,

By Sunday the fever had broken but I was still very weak and sick. I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower and tried to work through the throbbing, sore muscles to get ready for church. I wanted to be there so badly. I hadn’t missed in so long. I wasn’t going to make the morning service, but I took the time to carefully move my bruised and damaged body into nice clothes and brush out my hair until it shone for the evening service. I even curled my tresses, put on foundation, and mascara. Since I’ve flipped the part in my hair, it has always seemed off to me. The girl looking back at me in the mirror was so pale, eyes framed by perfect lashes, but face so… disappointing. I don’t blame you for finding another for your eyes to love.

The cobalt blue shirt I’d picked up at the thrift store hung around my torso in a loose billow, which pleased me tonight. I hurt so badly, I didn’t want anything touching me. What ever happened to that funky green suit coat you got in the spring from the thrift store? I wonder about it from time to time. The last time you ever smiled at me, even a half smile, mostly ironic and annoyed, but still a smile. I’m sorry I criticized your wardrobe. I felt like a heel the very next moment, and… ever since. All I did was fail you. I’m so sorry.

At church, you were sitting alone next to Brittany Ramirez and Brittany Lyons and some blonde girl. Levi, with all his girls. But I knew you weren’t there for any of them, just Anna. Why was she always late? I was curious but knew I’d never know. Not ever. I looked away from you and tried to focus on God, on the girls he had put in my life, on life on the other side of the balcony. Across the divide between your side and my side was open air and an invisible history, written by my words and your actions. It made tears burn in my eyes. You couldn’t see me through that space, and I couldn’t even cross over. God, why?

But downstairs, it was like another church. The church I knew over the spring, the summer. The place where I tried to know the locals and watched them deselect me from their groups slowly but surely. I was fed up with the church down stairs. Yet downstairs I went, to find Bro. Don. And we went to the piano in the practice room, and ran a few scales. Then he took me to meet Bro. Jim Willoughby, who would be working my schedule with the main Sunday School service in the auditorium. My favorite class these day… home, really.

One song every three months. My first would be the second week of November, and Bro. Don would come listen to hear me to determine if I was potential material for specials in the main service. I just want to sing. I just want to stand on the platform, and take that mic, and look up at the lights and the faces and let the memories, the pain, the comfort of the Spirit, every moment of the dark spring and the silent summer and the empty autumn… let it all just lift up to heaven. Give it all back to God. In front of the crowd of so many people that had let me pass in and out of their lives, to just show them that I love to sing for God. And to stand there in front of you, and show you that I did what you asked. I found my love for God again. I want you to know.

And if God gave me this voice, and this nonstop pull that keeps the music coming from my heart out my lips, then I want to give it back to him. Not by myself, but with a cello, a guitar… maybe the piano. I just want to create something beautiful to give back to Him. Why settle for nothing at all when I have the dream of something beautiful?

The last thing Bro. Don told me was that music spotlight ministry is only entrusted to people who show themselves faithful, accountable. And he said in the Bible, the ministry of song was specifically entrusted to the tribe of… Levi. It was the Levites who served in the temple through song. It made my heart catch. He was right… he was right.

Could it be possible? Maybe that’s why I have to sing. Maybe because since the beginning of time, it’s been entrusting to the people of your name. People who love God. People who have nothing to offer but their own pitiful self. People who found God’s grace.

Your star,

Rigel

Sickness

Dear Levi,

The inevitable came, I suppose. After weeks of struggling with non stop fatigue and exhaustion, headaches, and reoccurring sleeplessness, my immune system gave way to illness. By Friday, October 11^th, my fever was 102.8 degrees and I was shaking so badly at work I could barely stand. When I stared at the screen and tried to talk over the swelling infection in my throat, the tears literally burned down my feverish cheeks. I clocked out of work through Kronos, our timekeeping system, and hugged the wall on the long walk through the compound to my car. Outside, the cold wind sapped my lungs from oxygen and made my knees weak. I almost fainted before I reached Zoila and climbed in. Was it a miracle from God that my benefits through Panera, never used, expired in two days?

I drove straight to the after hours clinic. After three hours in ice-cold waiting rooms, and finding the Indian doctor standing at the computers drinking coffee with the off-duty nurses at one point, I was glad to hear it wasn’t strept. A pretty severe upper respiratory track infection, I was told as I was handed my doctor’s note for work and a prescription for antibiotics. What the heck is that?

I drove straight home and crawled into bed with sweats, hoodie, scarf, double socks, and tears all folded under the comfortless cloud of down feathers. The next eight hours I tossed and cried in agony as the fever scraped every ounce of strength and feeling from my body. I awoke again and again in the darkness, sheets tangled and clothes literally drenched, sick to my stomach and unable to breath past the pain in my throat. I changed clothes, and the cold came instantly to stick to my clammy skin like death’s embrace and start my bones shaking.

I dreamt, and they were burning black dreams of you, and Anna, and your wedding. I was the smiling, faceless photographer behind the lens documenting your happiness, hers, the end of my dreams and prayers. The guests held champagne glasses, but the light sparkling through them was grey. And my lens kept trying to find you, and all I could see was the sharp cut of your white collar, the curve of your strong hand stuffed in your pocket, the silhouette of your coat’s shoulders. Anna’s pretty long hair kept blocking out the lens, bouncing and danging in festivity to her perfect laugh, perfect smile. She looked at me and my lens framed in her happy face and I knew she didn’t know me. Neither did you. Or the guests. So I just snapped away, and no one paid me mind. And I couldn’t leave, either. Again and again I woke up shaking and coughing and gasping, crying out to God.

I know He hear me. He was with me that night, in the darkness, in the sickness.

I cried myself back to sleep and whimpered for you, for Levi, for your strong, gentle fingers massaging the sickness from my throat, for my head on your chest, for your arms and coat and cologne… God held me instead, but it wasn’t the same. I wanted my Levi.

Have you been sick this year? Did you miss me? Was someone there to bring you a drink, to make sure you had medicine, to pray for you? I wish I knew. I wish I was there.

Your star,

Rigel

South Grand Boulevarde

Dear Levi,

Last night was almost too much. I sat in the parking lot of church, watching you and her and your friends laugh and celebrate in the sweet light of the front steps and I just cried. I cried in the darkness and let my heart break, shatter, explode into tiny little pieces of insignificance. I know I'm sick. I know my body and my mind is worn out. I know it's late and it's been a long week. And above all those things, all I know is that I can't stop feeling the pain, I can't stop feeling the love. And I can't take it anymore. I just can't.

So I drove back to the beginning. I often visualize the hill by the boy's dorm as the moment when I lost it all. Maybe it was. But as I drove down the darkness to the little pitiful park on South Grand Boulevarde, I realized for the first time that this was truly the end. This was the gravestone. This was the last place you held me, the last time you cried, the last time you tried. This was the place of my final failure. This was the last place when I saw Levi inside your liquid caramel eyes, the last time I was allowed inside Santana and against your coat. The last time you cared for me.

I drove there, and I broke. I sat on the cold asphalt and felt the splinter of glass shards among the cheap crumbling blacktop and I sobbed, I sobbed, I sobbed. Freezing tears in the freezing wind, just as cold as that night. I could see the shadow of your car in my mind, I could see the curve of the tires against the asphalt just behind my reach. And my car sat there, a solemn reminder that I'm not crazy. We were here, once, you and I. And the Devon Tower glowed at us laughingly back then, too. Twinkling like a Satanic statute of what would never be across the vast, black expansion of some kind of field. That night a year ago, I thought about walking out into that field and lying down somewhere in the void and giving up on things. I thought about it this night, too. Last time, you were there to stop me. This time, the echo of your memory was.

It was so hard. It was so, so, hard. I cried, because there was no other option. I wept, because all I have is the fruit of my own failure. And there I was, all alone in the cold, and you were out somewhere in the warmth of your happy life.

How did you do it, Levi? How did you move on? How did you feel nothing, grieve nothing, find happiness again so soon? How did you dismiss all the dreams, all the plans, all the memories? And how did you decide that night as I drove off into the distance that you would never, ever try again?

Was she already in your life at that point? What happened on the long, black drive back home? What did you think when you got back into Santana? What did you think when you watched my lights disappear and heard my enginge explode into the quiet of the night? What did you think when you drove along that own route? Where did you go? And why did you come home so late? Why did you even bother to text me? At what point did you decide my tears were worthy of your hate, your disdain? When? When, Levi? When? And why? Oh, why why why?

It's because I can't comprehend how you moved on that I can't comprehend how you would ever come back. I used to dream. I used to dream, dream, and pray, pray. But now? Now? In the aloneness of that night in the miserable little speck of a park in a worthless city in a country that doesn't even know of my dreams in a world that is too busy for my existence, there was no hope. No more hope, no more dreams, no more prayers.

Just tears.

So many anguished, dying tears. Like the night I walked out of Andri's house and walked into the city night and found the church. When I crawled under the bench in the darkness of the garden and just cried, cried, cried. Another cold winter night in another pointless American city. Another night when I realized my lost. The pointlessness of it all. The hopelessness of it all. And that you would never, never care.

Andri came for me that night. Brad bundled me up in his coat and they drug me to a psychologist. But you didn't come for me this night. And I knew it. I knew you wouldn't. I knew you never would come for me. All I can think about is the night you found me on the bus, how broken I was, how empty and lifeless and... a shell of a soul, cringing on the edge of existence. And all I can think is that if I go to work tomorrow, if I put on a smile and pretend to join the world of the living, it's just a huge facade. Because I'm dead on the inside. I'm so dead anymore.

Just me, just God.

And that's when the prayers return. You see, it was never suicide. Not in anger. Not in despair. It was just... a desperate wish. A wish to be with God. Because if people are only going to leave me broken and cold and shivering and crying on the asphalt of an empty, soulless city... I just want to be with God. I just want to be in his arms. I just want to go home.

Please, God, please. Can't I come home to you now?

I'll never get him back. I know it. I'll never get him back, I'll never get a second chance. And that's okay... somehow... it's okay. I never deserved him the first time. I never dreamt he'd reach out in the darkness of that bus and change my life. He gave me hope when I had none... and then slowly took it all away agian, and here I am in the same place. With nothing but you, God. Isn't it enough? To just want to be with you now? You gave me my memories with him, and I wasn't ever worthy of them He was too good for me, too perfect, too sweet, too precious, too... unreal. Like an angel. My Levi angel.

And he's never coming back for me. Dri never did. Levi never will. I will only know loss. And I'm so tired, God, I'm so scared and alone and little and, please? please? must I beg so hard? Must I cry so many tears before you take me up in your wings? Where is your mercy? Oh, that you would show a drop of mercy on my broken soul. I can't bear the pain anymore. It is growing too great. It is swallowing me up.

And I went home, when I was so cried out there was nothing but dryness. Dryness and hollowness and... dizziness. A dizzy, swirling, distorted reality. Soulless. Resigned.

And I pulled out my Bible, and I read Psalm 69. And the verses, wow... they were me. But David is so much stronger than me. He had the patience of grace to bear his burden. Do I? Did I ever become a stronger girl than the one who died in Lake Arlynn in Pekin? Did I ever become better than her? Did I? And I went to bed, and I cried myself to sleep again, pitiful tears against hot cheeks and a feverish throat and swollen mind... and I knew that God was with me.

Somehow, in this darkness, there has to be hope.

Your star,
flickering in the darkness of the night sky...
Rigel