Jeremiah closes the door to his room. Everything he thinks about seems to work out. He thinks about what this means. Setting his bag down next to his bed, he kicks off his shoes and walks over to his desk. He flips the light on and falls into his chair.

Bending back, looking into his closet upside down, he exhales. If everything that comes to mind, comes to fruition, there is no more room for thought.

Scratching his head with both hands and an unlit cigarette, he gets up. Retrieving his bag, he walks the stairs down and out of the house. Seeing his breath on the night, he yells down the street, “I am no man!”

“I’m just a boy with a cigarette.”

You’re a good man, Jeremiah.

There are times when you drink so that you can smoke. When you push the table from the middle of the room so that you can do pushups. And you wake up early and stroll into work late. Que sera sera.

You watch your hands as you bring together your meals. You fascinate yourself that you are even here, that you even know that you are here. Someone recognizes you from around the corner. I am sure of nothing but that.

You tighten up your tie, enough room to keep your face that soft, flesh tone your mother gave you. Eyes on the ground, but straight forward, watching your feet as they bring together this path.

A drink at 5 o’clock. It happens somewhere. For Jeremiah, it happens everywhere for all he cares. It’s good for him. It’s good for everyone. All the dreams, they find somewhere else to wander at 5 o’clock. “It’s all yours,” he thinks, hunched over at the bar in his home. “Get the hell out!”

Tact no longer has a place in this world. Gilded streets, peacock dressings on every man, woman, and child. Nevermind.

It’s a dark place in the city outside the city. You must be thankful. Wherever life is, it’s a flash in the pan to Jeremiah. The hangover to a wonderful trip is a disastrous fall. Hands slip out of his, and heads no longer act as one while the hearts still separate, delicately. “You’ll never know what you meant to me,” Jeremiah says, faintly catching his reflection in his glass, “the world makes for a dark conscience.”

Shit. I love this Purity Ring album. It is slow, methodical, has just enough minor key hits in its melodies to keep you off balance. Crawlersout is killing me right now. I sit in a library, in my room, a coffee shop, even at work and bounce my head. I imagine myself the greatest tut-er in the world under strobing lights. Man, it takes me that far away from wherever I am.

I’m back in GR, scoping the scenery. It has remained the way I’ve always left it. That is an anchor for me these days. The idea that above all the change, this place has stayed the same. In as many ways this place has not changed, my experience within its limits has changed dramatically. With all the new things that have come across the line for me, I approach it with excitement and lamenting for what once was. Luckily, the lamentations do not take precedence.

I quietly deal with my shit on my own. I cry. But there is something wonderful about community. We were built to help with this. A huge thank you to all who have been there for me, and for her. You guys are our strength and our hope for the coming days. It’s a large task, but we are all good for it. You lean in order that someone can lean on you someday. Bless you, beautiful friends.

He is passing it all. Rhythm, a guide. Less appreciated for it’s presence, but for the lack of it. Bend after bend. Pulling into the station, Jeremiah exits the car and clicks his heels feeling the pressure on his chest and brows. No maps lead him there, it’s the feeling. It’s the feeling. A deep bass, inaudible. Gathering the storm.

Out of the corner of his eye, she shows herself. Nothing recognizable, merely flashing and orbiting. Straight and narrow. Jeremiah plans his path to the finest inch. Explosions in the sky, he and she begin to run. Now underfoot, the windows, the peaks of these mountains, the air of the heavens. This is where the end is. The end is no end. This end is an end to the next beginning.

Jeremiah cools and calms and she smiles as they walk through the door of the basement level. Nothing has changed around him. Everything happens to him with no evidence of his curses and cures.

This is what it’s all about Jeremiah. This is what you are. You are your thoughts.

He hasn’t a clue. Not for what he is doing nor for what time of the day it is. He must rise up. There is a spot somewhere that pulses and explodes for life and what it finds in it. He is that life. He cannot find what he seeks in a room upstairs, hindered by this ragged skin he has calloused and bruised.

It all seems like redemptive license as his steps follow the rails. The pacing of life quickens, when at his greatest depths he finds a small door. His tragic exit. Grown accustom to Jeremiah, those demons long for that connection and warmth they felt for so long. He doesn’t just turn his back on a pit, he turns his back on those that called him a friend.

At a sweatening pace, the car rattles and Jeremiah is pushed back to this conscious world. Fleet of foot, wrapped up in his thoughts, he stares forward at a sunset over the neighborhood to the west.

It’s not over Jeremiah. It is far from that.

I’ve had this thought for some time now about the after-life. About human nature, about the combination of the two, and how it relates to the stories we have told and continue to tell subsequent generations. The creation of legacy and the idea that we want messages to feel true, both with a lower case and capital “T”.

I have this sneaking suspicion that, as humans, we have a tendency to want to control whatever it is we come into contact with. This is played out in every facet of human life. We have gone to incredible lengths to control nature, food, science, our pets, and even, though not limited to the darkest parts of our American history, control of other humans.

Control is why we fight wars. It is why we work and why we compete. It is even why we love. I want someone to control my heart. Without control I suppose we would spiral? To not put too fine a point on it.

So what, then, does it look like to have control in a Christian setting? It has always sounded to me like control was the first thing one must learn to give up to be part of what God has planned. That has always made enough sense (while also making less and less sense as time passes). In order to gain life, we must give it up to Him. I can live with that.

I think of Rob Bell’s book when I reach this point. Bringing Heaven to Earth. How are we to know who gets in and who is forced to stay out? Is God so cut and dry that He needs us to say an incredibly simplistic phrase, mapped out for us by preachers, parents, and general passers-by on Facebook? Or is He that much greater than we’ve ever been able to understand, that His ways trump whatever box we think is most convenient to place Him in to serve our purposes?

Without digressing, I will get to my point. I bring up Rob Bell because I tend to agree that the children who practice peace on the other side of the world, will not miss out on God’s end-of-time plans. I think I believe in a God that loves what has come to be created and wants badly to be with us where we are, wherever we are.

Good deeds will not get us to Heaven is a popular phrase people like to throw out when something like this is said. You can’t get to Heaven through anything you can do here. It is pretty incredible that out of the entire human experience, the most important part of it, the end, boils down to how well you give up control in this one, minute area. A conversation that literally takes five seconds.

There is an interesting twist that I have found goes unnoticed about this giving up of control. Actual giving up of control, to me, looks like this. You go through life giving up control of your wealth, your comfort, and even your health, that someone might feel grace.

What it does not look like is accumulation, selfishness, and a general disdain for anyone who is not you.

And even this faux “giving up of control” actually gets tainted by human nature. To give up control is to let God decide what he will do in the end. Live your life and if it is sufficient, then it is. But we, as humans have injected control into the most important act of “giving up control!”

In order that we might have eternal life, we must “accept” Jesus into our hearts. If we do not, we are not part of the chosen. Wait… I thought we were supposed to lose life to gain it. When put this way, it is not Jesus that saves. It is our own choice that saves. Because, if I were to not consciously choose, then I’m on the outside looking in. Or so I’m told.

Salvation is no longer in Jesus in that context. What he did on the cross is not important if we are to believe what we’ve been told, that “choosing” salvation is the key. Jesus could have been eating a hot dog at a picnic table for all anyone cares, if it all boils down to US and OUR control over OUR salvation. What makes more sense, is that what Jesus actually did, covers US ALL, no matter who we are. That is real salvation. That is humankind actually giving up control that we succumb, in the end, to what God decides, not what we decide gets us in.

I say this more or less as a hopeful word. I believe in a God that is all-powerful and able to read between our lines. What I have a harder time believing is the many that you and I know who inject control in a more subtle way than they even realize they are.

This story has been passed down thousands of years and has gone through parts of history that used this book to control the thoughts and actions (as well as the money) of its followers. To be so naive that there is some infallible nature within a physical book is giving up on the abilities to critically process and imagine God as He intended us to! What is this mind for if not to try and imagine what this world could be like if we each tried to bring peace and harmony to each of our parts of it?

He holds these eyes that seem tired. All he does is sleep and stay awake. It’s a strange feeling to be in the middle and at the end, both ends, at one time. Thinking about the future with cement blocks in the lake. Curious about the world, opened infinitely, in the shaded light of his empty house. Punching the back of his chair out of excitement and anguish in moments neatly lined up.

And the moment goes away. Seated again, comfortably. Stare away Jeremiah. You have your capacities again.

It feels to him that these moments take no form other than his expressions. Where is it that he can find the feelings and combat them in the open? With relative ease, in the daylight, he has pushed the source away. Like a predator, they only kill when hungry and find no joy in overindulging. Unaware of his thankfulness, Jeremiah reaches across the arm rest for a television remote and slides away from curiosity for a while.

He grew up without any particular idea. He wasn’t deeply taken by anything, but one could not say he was aloof either. Actively observant, he lay, then crawl, and would eventually walk with eyes wide. And arms even wider. If left to his own, one could imagine he would have taught himself to walk and speak as we have all learned at one time or another. The curious among us.

With a propensity to sit as much as to wander, Jeremiah closed his eyes and replayed the same memories in his head late at night. As a grown man, he had known many things, but experienced few of them. Terrorized by the guilt of a life unexamined, he tossed under the weighted blankets in his room. On a day like this, not unlike the day before it, he began to imagine new words and their definitions in a place he could not fully form.

What it is I wish for him, I probably could not tell you.