Work Text:
Nothing about this was like a human lover. I'd known several, in my time among the redstone colonnades. My kilt had been stirred by this one and that one, boys and girls I'd grown up with. I was a curiosity, a toy, a friend, an experiment, and they were the same to me.
But this was not that.
This was being carried away by Mother Nile in a coracle. This was blazing up like a creosote bush. I was amazed that there was even a self of me left to scribe what I was feeling into my heart. This was my G-d, and G-d wanted everything of me and about me.
I stumbled and fell, and the mud under my knees, the straps of my sandals, were finer and more intense than any lovemaking I had ever imagined. I shuddered, so full of G-d that I could not think of satisfaction, only an intense yearning for more and more. There was no part of me that was clean or unclean, because it was all holy, and touched by G-d. I felt more and more as G-d entered into me, in communion with me, or I with G-d. My nipples hardened, my scrotum drew up. I could feel myself stretching my mortal shell into something that wanted to reach for G-d, but G-d was everywhere around me, everywhere in me. G-d was my full belly, my heavy limbs, my longing mouth.
G-d, G-dself did not say words as I knew them. Instead I knew that I had been blessed with one grain of G-d's attention, and it was that REGARD that was filling me up, up to overwelling, up to screaming, up to orgasm, and beyond. I felt that all of my viscera, all that made me a human was being squeezed out to make room for G-d, and G-d's joy in me. And G-d's need.
G-d needed me. Not a man, not someone like me. Me in particular, as the keystone of G-d's plan. Everything about me had been leading up to this moment, and G-d took delight in me, and I took delight in knowing I was the right man at the right time. G-d needed me, and that keening grasp for connection and alliance shook me even further, until I lay in the mud, panting with a small part of myself, because G-d showed me how large I was, not in flesh, but in connection, influence, skill, posterity. G-d is not terribly linear in G-d's love. Instead G-d loved everything about who I was, and who I had been, and who I would be.
Oh, I wanted G-d. Not only as a lover, nor a lawmaker, but as a presence in my life, a towering presence too fantastically huge to understand, let alone describe. I did not want to walk with G-d, I wanted to BE G-d, and never be further from G-d than a thought. I wanted to be as full of G-d as a woman with child, and I wanted to be held by G-d like an unborn infant, and I wanted G-d to drink me in like cool water.
And then G-d pulled back the mote of attention I had been granted, and my body was my own again, still blessed, still G-d's holy temple, but a thing of flesh again, and all the sexual sensation that had been drowned in the flood of regard came roaring back. I spent my seed without so much as moving, and when I at last opened my eyes to the blazing world, everything was alight with the fingerprints of G-d. The sand and water coruscated to blind me, and the very bushes seemed to flame with the passage of G-d's robes. I felt aflame myself, burned as by the sun, tender and raw and exquisite.
I wept for my loss, for the loss of G-d in me, as riveting as a broken bone. I buried my face in my kilt and wept like a child for the loss of everything I had not known, until then, to desire.
G-d said, "I AM".
And all I could do was follow, the footsteps of G-d, doing what I hoped would please G-d, fearing G-d and loving G-d, and caring for his people, who had now become my people. Every night, in my tent, I prayed to meet G-d again.
I hope that out here, in the wilderness, away from everything else, G-d will come to me again. I pray for G-d's touch.