Tikva Eibik

Officially WINS for releasing during exams. As we hide from the guns, on our night reconnaissance! It’s so much better than Yes, Virginia; and about on a par with The Dresden Dolls. I am an anarchist, an anti-Christ, an asterisk. And I love Dear Jenny with mouth. Ashley talks to astronauts back home by way of fax transmission.

In addition, anyone who can identify these gets a prize:

I’m Christian.
But sometimes I can’t tell.

Not the big things – they’re all straight up and sorted. My grand scheme is God’s, He gave it to me partly through Lauren and partly through my own mind’s eye; every major decision I make in my life is in aspiration to that goal. And I will achieve it, there is nothing in this world or the next which can keep me from it. I haven’t aspired to a normal life with a husband and kids since I was about eleven – although not for this reason until about two years ago.

But the little things… the small everyday things. I seem to have lost them. I rarely lose my sense of God’s presence, looking over my shoulder or sniggering at me from on high (and who wouldn’t), and on the occasion that I do, just realising I have brings it back. I meditate and I pray; and it’s not a case of me trying to communicate and never receiving a response – we talk, about the most serious and the silliest of things (but don’t tell the Catholics that God has a sense of humour). When we talk, I alternate between a best friend and a smitten niblet. I’ve long since learnt that I rarely know best, and that seems to hold true in that when I don’t ask for miracles, the best things happen. So I only ask simple things of God; companionship, love, courage in fear, and someone to run crying to when I get lost in my own mind and return to find blood and alcohol all over the place. And all of this He gives me, and always has, whether I ask it or not.
When we talk to each other, my peace is absolute, and my understanding perfect. I have no need nor want unfulfilled, and I succeed in whatever I happen to be doing at the time.

But anyone who knows me knows I don’t talk for long. It’s maybe less true in this case, but our conversations are still finite. Even the pauses are utopia – but when I switch back to my immediate surroundings, when God is a knowledge and a sense as basic as awareness of my own limbs, I feel… almost alone. I lose hope. I don’t understand things. I fall into turmoil again… and I never used to. I used to carry that peace, that serene wisdom, with me for hours running into days.
Maybe it means that the part of me which doesn’t have that peace is struggling more than before. Or is it that state of me? I’m not sure. I hate it, either way. I hate a lack of God with all the passion with which I love God. That’d be all of it, in fact; and I don’t want to have to choose between flying in ecstasy and falling into pointless confusion. I don’t do things by halves, and that seems like a half-baked way to live to me.