Pact

How about this. How about you live, and I live, and you let me get obsessed with God and I let you get obsessed with this universe and the extraordinary god-sized explanation you’re always on about. And how about you never mock me for my obsession, and I never pooh-pooh yours. How about we just see what happens. Just live and see. Even double-down on it, like some sort of crazy experiment. And, years from now, when we’ve both really entered our lives, let’s not just forget each other. Let’s keep an eye out. Who knows, maybe we’ll catch a tantalizing glimpse from afar. I’m serious. If you see me doing something that makes you stop and go, What now?, in a way that makes you just a little more awake, I want to know. Ask me about it! Promise you’ll ask and not just shrug and make something up in your head. And I promise the same thing: if you do something that stirs my depths, something that makes me go, Ah! Ah!, then—I swear it—I’ll get up from wherever I am, go over to you and say, Tell me. Agreed? This may never happen of course. It’s just as possible the two of us never again enter the slim bright circle of each others’ attention, and we have to account for that. Maybe, even, we end up longing for each other, looking high and low, only to find that our paths have brought us so far apart we are practically at separate ends of the universe and there’s no hope of contact. Wouldn’t that be just too terribly sad? They say all seekers are climbing different sides of the same mountain, but we just don’t know. Well. If one moonless night you or I look up from a hungering solitude and begin to bleat like lost sheep for a way out, a way to undo the whole huge implacable work of time, remember: we wanted to give each other something. A gift of morning hope. We wanted to share honey of the spirit, we wanted to lead to each others’ doorsteps whole cavalcades of beautiful monsters praising the midnight sun. That’s right. We wanted to show everyone how in the heart lives a gratitude the exact shape of the shapeless world, and so we made a pact. A pact that would run deeper than all loneliness, a pact that would bring us back from even the farthest reaches of the fifth dimension, this pact, this one awesome ongoing madness that we share.