Christian Writing Contest

The Athanatos Christian Ministries 2009

William Blake Award

goes to

Nate Rankin

Richardson, TX

Third Place

(category:  High School)

Bio: My name is Nate Rankin and I am the Loudest and Proudest member of the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of 2013. My home is in Richardson but in the fall I will go to school to Texas A&M. Growing up I was fascinated with the fantastical worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I had read The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia by the time I completed 6th grade. My Mom is an English teacher and was the one who inspired me to pick up books. My dad was the one who inspired ambition and told me I could be anything I wanted to be. The story was inspired by Josh Hamilton and Craig Ferguson and their struggles with addiciton and alcoholism. My main writing inspiration was Douglas Coupland as well as Craig Ferguson.

To contact Nate Rankin you may request his contact information through the contest administrators by sending an email to director@athanatosministries.org.

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To Make A Wretch His Treasure

By: Nate Rankin

Copyright 2009, All Rights Reserved

How deep the Father’s love for us,

How vast beyond all measure

That He should give His only Son

To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss,

The Father turns His face away

As wounds which mar the chosen One,

Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon a cross,

My sin upon His shoulders

Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,

Call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that held Him there

Until it was accomplished

His dying breath has brought me life

I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything

No gifts, no power, no wisdom

But I will boast in Jesus Christ

His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?

I cannot give an answer

But this I know with all my heart

His wounds have paid my ransom

-Stuart Townend

For the man who has lost hope but not his chance, for those who seek the heavenly kingdom and find a corrupt world, for those who suffer in the name of our Lord yet continue to bear their crosses, may you find encouragement in these words…

“My name is Tucker Collins. And I am an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for six weeks now, but I have wasted away the last three years. Now, in contrast to a lot of you in my situation, I wasn’t abused as a child, my daddy never drank, and my momma was around when I was a kid. They were there, and they were good to me. I went to private schools my whole life, went to church every Sunday, and I was baptized before I could read. I guess what I’m getting at is — or trying to say to you is — that I –I — don’t know why I am the way that I am. I don’t know who set me off or what caused me to suddenly start binge drinking on the weekends, showing up to church hung-over, announcing to the whole congregation that Jesus was outside on the street corner holding up a crude cardboard sign that wrote some wretched message to the world of how it would end.” I paused at that moment and looked up at the rest of the group in the poorly lit gymnasium and unclenched my suddenly sweaty palms from the podium. I took a deep breath. “I am Tucker Collins. And I am an alcoholic.”

“Hi Tucker,” the crowd responded. It was a dull murmur, and I knew that a good majority of the people were not interested in my story at all because they had one of their own self-therapeutic speeches to give. And after all who would pay attention to a tale told by an idiot when you had your own to give? So I walked back to the back of the crowd where my seat was, sat down, and tried to compress my body to conform to the chair as much as possible.

Slowly the rest of the group got up to the front and talked about their progressions or digressions and triggers and suppressants. It would end with Chris thanking everyone and congratulating people on the progress they had made and how this really worked and blah blah blah.

I don’t suppose I despised Chris; I suppose I just felt mad at him because while I was now sober I couldn’t get past the fact that I didn’t know the reasons for my regressions. As I had told the mass, I didn’t know why I started. I wanted more results than the weekly circle time support groups and the two minutes of confession to the crowd. I wanted a cure for the flu and all I was getting was medicine for the symptoms.

Of course I need to explain myself further. This was not the first time I had been sober. I suppose the first eighteen years should count, but my first attempt to quit ended up failing after weekly sessions like these. I stringed together about four months before I relapsed. That following morning I awoke in a stranger’s house soaked in a mixture of beer, vodka, pool water, and the stench of what I can best guess was my own urine. It was a Sunday, so I dared not go to church, and I sat in my car drifting between sleep and blackouts. The following Tuesday I still felt sick, though I gathered it was more from guilt then from the alcohol and skipped the AA meeting. That was my first relapse.

When I told my parents a month ago that I was sober again, they cringed. But I was past what they thought. Three relapses can make even the most honest parents question themselves. But I never blamed them. Sure I blamed my Scottish heritage, claiming it was in my blood, and I blamed peer pressure, and I rationalized it to a point where I could convince people that Christ himself was an alcoholic. But never my parents. I knew they didn’t believe me any more than Bill Maher believes in a god, but I had a new inspiration. Her name was Sarah.

It was a cloudy morning. The wind blew through the trees and whistled in the gutters. It carried the tiny wet messengers of rain to the ground, declaring it was time for growth and a new beginning. As the drops hit my face, I began to look up. I could see the hope of light through the clouds. Even when it’s cloudy you can always see the sun.

Feeling as if pencils were pushing my eyes back into my sockets, I got up. I observed the house whose porch I had used for a bed. Mixed red brick with a green door. I rang the doorbell. Sully answered and I grunted a hello. It was still early. Around seven I believe. So I crept carefully over the empty beer cans, the kegs, the passed out human beings, and their personal belongings.

I grabbed my keys, wallet, and phone. They would be my lifelines now. Change was calling, and I would need a way to answer, pay and get to it. Sully said something about not driving, but I flipped him off and was on my way out. There was change to be made and it wasn’t going to be stopped by some Mick who was no doubt intelligently inferior and more hungover than I was.

My first stop was coffee. The myth is that coffee will soak up the alcohol and allow you to have your wits more about you. Whoever created the myth was obviously never above the legal alcohol-driving limit. It doesn’t matter what you put in your body if the alcohol’s already there. The best thing coffee can do is caffeinate you. I ordered black coffee and mixed it with some crème I seemed to perpetually have in my car. I sipped it slowly as I stared at my three new lifelines.

I had no apartment as I had decided I wasn’t going to come up with the money anyway and had left early. I had no relatives within a good 200 miles of myself. And all my friends were hungover or not talking to me. I listed off my options, which took all of five seconds. I could go to rehab again or I could find a decently sober friend and crash with him until I made a decision. At about this time I noticed that all twenty tables in the café had been filled up. Then along came Sarah.

Of all the tables in the café, of all the coffee shops around the city, of all the people she could have sat with, she asked me. Don’t ask me why. I’m sure my eyes were still bloodshot and that I had the hangover stubble on my chin, but she was polite and had a smile on her face and asked if she could sit. I said she could and she asked why I was staring at my things. “They’re my friends.” I said half-humorously.

She smiled and said, “Do they have names?”

“Phone, wallet, and keys” which I expected to kill the conversation, but she kept going.

“How bout Ringy, Money, and Shiny.”

“So my keys can only shine is that it?”

“ They’re not driving right now and the sun just came out, I can see the money in your wallet, and your phone’s going off.” She said with a smile. I looked down and noticed she was right. It was just my alarm clock. I turned it off and muttered a “thanks.”

“So I haven’t seen you around here before. You new?”

“ To town or coffee?” This made her laugh. It sounded like music. I caught myself.

“ I mean this isn’t a place that gets a lot of new customers. Kind of a hole in the wall.” A pause. “Not a usual customer I suspect.”

“Uh no. Not here.” I wanted to say more. I really did, but I was so tired and so distressed. I just took a sip of my coffee and sighed. Heavily.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’ve been better,” I said as I scratched my chin. She just looked at me sympathetically. “I need to use the bathroom, ‘scuse me.”

I didn’t stay in the bathroom long. Just long enough to wash my face and say a little prayer. I’ve always wondered why God doesn’t talk back. Maybe the whole religion thing was a farce. Maybe God had filled up heaven and was just mocking those of us still holding out hope. Maybe after we didn’t give him any room in the inn he wouldn’t give us any. Seemed logical to me at the time.

I came back and was surprised that Sarah was still there. What she said next blew my brain. “Finnegan Tucker Collins you’re coming with, and I’m going to help you” I had left my lifelines on the table. Still I tried to play stupid.

“Help me? Whaddya mean?”

“Come on, you have four dollars in your wallet, you obviously don’t have a house key, and your background on your phone is you holding up a Bud Light bottle looking completely wasted.”

“To be fair that’s dip-spit so you can’t assume I’m an alcoholic. And call me Tucker”

“I didn’t say you were an alcoholic.”

“You implied.”

“Please let me help you,” She was begging now. And as much as the fiber of my muscles twitched and the core of me despised her nosiness and despised her for wanting to help me, I broke. There were no words; I just took her hand and she led me.

We ended up talking for an hour in the parking lot. I was awkward at best with her. It’s funny how the booze will get you feeling loose. It shakes off the nerves. Plus you can be brutally honest with people and not even realize it. But there I was dancing around with my mouth trying to recapture the intellect I used to have. And the thing was . . . it was wonderful. Being in an awkward conversation was something I hadn’t participated in since high school. I was re-learning my innocence that had been paralyzed by the alcohol. I managed to get her number, which she of course wrote on the back of a business card for an AA group. Did I mention she wanted to help?

So six weeks later there I was trying to find the cure for the itch. I walked out of the doors of the safe haven into the depraved crooked world. It’s hard to believe that architects are still building everything straight. I hopped in my car and drove myself to Sarah’s. I had been staying with her since I told her my parents didn’t want me back. I had lied. One vice for another I suppose, but she made me feel safe. And it’s not like we were sleeping together. I don’t even know if we were in a relationship. I just couldn’t stand the world anymore.

“We’re like the air” Sully use to say. “Our days are like a fleeting shadow.” Took me a couple years to figure out he got that from the Bible. Told me that was the reason we should drink up today and barf out tomorrow. So there we all would be . . . drinking until our vision was blurry and fighting each other over how many beers we thought we had in us. And I have to say it was great. That was before my guilt, and before I thought I had a problem. It was as if being an alcoholic took some invincibility out of me. I now had a problem, and no one wants to befriend a problem because no one wants to fix something that could be wrong. Then you just realize that there actually is something wrong with you. It’s the same reason those self-conscious-adolescent-oh-my-gosh-will-I-ever-get-a-boyfriend-girls don’t look in the mirror. They don’t want to see flaws because they’re too embarrassed to fix them. And the ones that do aren’t satisfied and end up with a problem. The whole healthy self-esteem concept is a load of crap. People hate flaws so we cover them with booze, makeup, a smile, or any number of lies and deceptions.

When I got home, as it were, Sarah wasn’t there. Funny, she hadn’t said anything. So I made myself a pizza and watched Comedy Central. After I finished, I tried her cell phone. It must have been off because it went straight to voicemail. I threw my phone on the couch and mulled over my current situation.

I thought about Sarah. She was about five and a half feet tall. Light skin but not fair, dark hair but not black and straight. She had really warm brown eyes. The kind of eyes that talk like angels. She had a cute nose that was very round like a miniature golf ball. You could call her physically attractive, but she never wore makeup except a little eyeliner, and she almost always wore a t-shirt with blue jeans. She didn’t have an accent, which was refreshing. It reminded me of home. She was one of those girls that was attractive because of her heart. I could have always gone and lived with Sully, but I could have also always put a gun to my head. Sarah gave me a pillow for my head and an escape from the bedlam. She laughed at my jokes and would tell me she loved me for them. We both had moved past the awkward parking lot stage and had moved towards the help-a-fellow-Christian-out-stage. As an only child I never knew what a sibling was like. This was close, probably even better. I still didn’t know what her mission was. She just told me it was God’s will. “But why not go pick up some homeless bum on the street and help him?” I asked one day.

“Because he won’t appreciate it the way you will. You haven’t realized how much better you are than this, Tuck.”

“Than what?” I asked

“Than everything.” And she stopped at that. I didn’t care I just wanted to get sober and back to church on Sundays. She was very adamant about church. And who could blame her with the pastor there. He was so human. Every other pastor I knew was an old guy who had that holier-than-thou attitude, despite any rebuking towards it. Pastor Jake would always get up there and be an inspirational eeyore. Talking about everything he sucked at and every little doubt he had. It was as if the sky was falling, and God was burying us underground to avoid the impact. The gist I got from him was this, we will sin everyday and God will take us back. And then we’ll sin some more and God will take us back. And then we’ll spit on his face, drive nails in his arms and legs, whip him to the brink of death, insult him, deny him, and curse his very creation, and he will still take us back.

When Sarah hadn’t gotten home by ten, I started to worry. She always kept tabs on me. Always called me and left me encouraging texts. I called again. Voicemail again. I jumped up and looked for her phonebook. I called around to close friends of hers I had met. No one had seen or heard from her. I began to really freak out. It was worse than the time I had done mushrooms with my friends in college. I called again. Nothing. I needed her now. I barely knew her, yet I was dependent on her grace. I finally realized I wasn’t going to contact her. So I tried to think of something that would calm me down. So naturally I went and bought some alcohol.

Thirty minutes later I was back at Sarah’s house with a bottle of Grey Goose, some Southern Comfort, and a six-pack of Budweiser. I had to have stared at it for thirty minutes before I decided what I would do. I was half hoping Sarah would walk in and freak out at the alcohol eighteen inches away from me. But no luck. It was just the booze and me. No one would have to know. I could drink any one of them then return the others and fall asleep on the couch, with little to no hangover at all.

But then I thought of Sarah. I couldn’t do it to her. So I went to her room and pulled out her Macbook and started typing. The sun had just come up.

I called Sarah’s friend Cherry. She said she hadn’t seen or heard from her since the day before she disappeared. I still have the three things of alcohol stashed away. But I’m convincing myself they’re for celebration when she comes home.

But why did she leave? I heard my mom one time talking about how some people who did kindly things were angels sent from heaven. I wondered if Sarah was some fantastical angelic body, whose presence I had just been completely ignorant of this whole time. Maybe she was in deep with the mob, and they finally found her. Maybe she didn’t really own this house and some realtor would walk in any moment and announce it was for sale by the bank and that I would have to leave. I didn’t know. I was looking for clues but nothing turned up. She was neat. Didn’t have more than two drawers of clothes, nothing hidden in her closets, no safes, no weird phone messages, nothing.

I thought back to the parable of the lost sheep. Sheep gets lost, master leaves the whole herd behind, and comes back with the lamb no problem. But this seemed the total opposite. When was the last time the master got lost? She wasn’t supposed to get lost. She was supposed to have found me and fixed me, and then I could go back home and get a decent job and earn a decent living. But here I was alone. Staving off my itch for alcohol with a Monster energy drink.
There was only one weird incidence with Sarah that I can remember. We were on a quasi-date—as I said I don’t know if we ever had a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship before—at a somewhat fancy restaurant. I was holding her hand, and we were having a really deep conversation—and by deep conversation I mean I was straight up flirting with her. She looked really deep into my eyes and she got the biggest little smile anyone’s seen this side of the Atlantic. All of a sudden I see this big brawny looking guy walk in with a girl so beautiful it made me want to crawl on my belly like a reptile. Since Sarah was facing away, she didn’t see him at first. Then he looked our way and did a double take at both of us. At the same instant she saw him and breathed out the only curse word I’d ever heard her say. “Let’s get the check. Now,” she said immediately after.

“You know that guy over there?”

“I think I see our waiter.”

“Hey!” I snapped my fingers in her face. “You know him?”

There was a long pause. “No”

“You can just say you don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t know him Tuck.” She turned to our waiter and asked him for the check.

And that was it. There wasn’t anything else really peculiar about her. I had met a handful of her friends, Cherry being her closest, and they were all a lot like her. They all were sympathetic to me and wanted to help me through my “trials”. After wandering around the apartment for another hour, I decided to call Cherry again. This time I was going to ask about the guy.

“Hello?” she said after picking up after the fourth ring.

“Cherry it’s Tucker; I need to ask you something.”

“What’s up hon?”

“Did Sarah ever have a relationship with anyone that might have been bad in any way?” I was sounding very vague, but I guess I didn’t want to leave anything out. Anything important, I needed to hear.

“Well—oh—there was this really serious boyfriend—some Irish guy can’t really remember his name—she dated a little more than a year ago. Why?”

“What did he look like?”

“Uh—about—six twoish, really broad, red hair…” I didn’t listen to the rest because I knew whom she was talking about. Suddenly I felt like I was falling. I felt like someone had tossed me out of the sky and I was part of this big puzzle that was cascading down headed for a hard fall of realization. But I needed more clues. I hung up, grabbed my keys and an energy drink, and was in my car before Cherry called back. My mind was racing. She knew him! Why did she lie? There was something there that I needed to know, something dark and repressible. I needed a name.

My first stop was the restaurant we had eaten at, Hillenshire’s. Somehow he had to be known by someone there. He had made heads turn around the whole room. On the ride there my head was starting to feel light. My hands were getting clammy. At this point I usually required a stiff drink and a round of beer pong. But I kept calm. As best I could at the least. I tried breathing through my nose. Slowly. Catching my wind and wits about me, I turned into the parking lot.

It was the middle of the afternoon, a little before 4:00, so no one was going to be there most likely. I opened the door and shivered. They had the air conditioning on full blast in there. I walked up to the hostess as she greeted me.

“How often do you normally work here?” I asked.

She was a bit taken aback and then she smiled and said, “I work full time here, mostly in the evenings.”

Before she could ask or say anything further I came back, “So you would recognize a normal customer?”

“Yes, ah you looking for someone in particular? Maybe they got a reservation.”

“Um—is there a—well I was here once and um—is there a tall red-headed guy, probably comes in with a hot date?”

“Honey, we’re in South Bahston, they’re a lotta guys that look like dat, and frankly I don’t know what you would define as a hot date.” She was getting a bit of an attitude on herself.

“I mean like model type. He really stands out—like a lot of people recognize him…”

“You might be talking about Peter McCreedy, the manager’s son.”

“How often is he here?”

“He’s probably over at his bar right now. Three blocks down, take a right outta here and just drive. It’s on the right.” She said the name of it, but I couldn’t hear it. I had to find this Peter guy. Maybe he would know something about Sarah I didn’t. It would likely be awkward, but I had to know. I never knew when it would be too late.

I walked into the bar and asked for the manager. The bartender said he wasn’t in, so I asked where he was.

“Prolly on a hot date. Why? Who’s asking? I ain’t never seen you in here before.”

“Did he used to have a girlfriend named Sarah!”

At the sound of that the guy’s eyes bugged out and his eyebrows rose. His forehead muscles tightened and his mouth shrunk to the size of his thumbnail.

“Hey, if you know somethin ‘bout Sarah you better keep yuh mouth shut. It’s a sore subject around here.” He looked at me suspiciously yet inquisitively. “Yon’t look like her type. Why doncha sit down, loosen up.”

“I’m an alcoholic. I didn’t come here for booze.” I stopped and glared at him to make sure he got the message I wasn’t having anything. “What happened with Sarah and Peter?”

“You sure you don’t want a drink?”

I glared.

“Fine, I’ll getchu a water, because it’s a long story.” He set the bottle down and started talking. “So Petey comes in one day and tells me he’s got a new girl. I shrug it off, cuz whaddo I care, you know? He tells me about her and starts talking about how she’s changed him and how he’s going back to church. Well not real church, da Proddy kind. Anyway he starts talking about how he thinks we’re doing the wrong thing here. Selling alcohol and how its leadin’ to all this sin and makin’ people screwed up you know. Course he never goes troo wid it, because a bar in Boston is like a baseball field in Iowa. If you build it, they will come. Anyways about nine months in he’s starting to get really depressed, and he’s mopin’ around here like a dog widout a bone. I ask him what’s wrong, and he says that he asked Sarah to marry him and she said no. The gall! Anyway I tell him to go find a new girl, but he says he don’t want another girl, he wants this one. Come to find out, she won’t marry him cuz a da bar. I tell him I’ll run the bar and he can go marry her. Well he wouldn’t have it. Says I’m trying to steal his business, which I kinda am, and he steams on outta here. Next thing I hear she’s been in bed wid his best friend this whole time. Now I ain’t sayin’ nothing here, but two weeks later cops call Petey telling him this same guy’s body was found dead in his apartment. Says it looks like a mob job. Now you didn’t hear it from me, but someone called Sarah and told her to skip town and lie low. Since then, see no, hear no, speak no, know what I’m saying?” He winked.

I was sick. Physically. It was worse than any binge-drinking hangover I had ever had. The room started to spin. I hadn’t had a sip of anything, not even the bottled water. My hands were wet and every cell on my body felt like it had a heartbeat of its own. I gave the guy a tip, Sonny, he asks me to call him, and I head for the door.

Suddenly here it was right before me. My idol, my savior was in all reality probably dead or being hunted. I had called the police and filed a missing persons report, but nothing had shown up this last week. I didn’t have much time. I had to find her. The only way to do that though was confront McCreedy. I couldn’t speak his first name since the conversation at the bar. This much I knew, though, if Sarah had been killed, I could go right to the police and get McCreedy in handcuffs really quick. If not, then she had probably escaped again and wasn’t going to come back to Boston any time soon. I had to act. I wasn’t going to be able to pay any bills of hers, so I had to form a plan.

I wound up calling the police. I talked to a cop that said he would hook me up with a wire and have me see if I could get anything on the murder of McCreedy’s former friend or of Sarah since it was still an open case. I prayed for the former and against the latter. Basically my plan was to go to McCreedy’s bar, find a way to not invoke a fight, and get out of there with something incriminating. I’d have to lull him into it, though. I couldn’t come on too strong or too eager. “God have mercy on me,” I prayed.

A bar fight is a lot different sober than it is the right way. I tried to play it cool. But it got out of hand fast, and before I knew it the Scots were fighting the Irish again. You’d think we’d learn. Anyway I walked in and noticed he was serving drinks. It was a Tuesday, not a lot of business that night. I went up to him and asked for a coffee with some cream.

“You know there’s a Starbucks right down the road don’t ya?”

“Yeah—just—I don’t like Starbucks.”

“You been in here before?”

“ Uh no not really.”

“I recognize ya, it’s like déjà vu all over again.”

“I know whatcha mean. Hey is that a wedding ring?”

“It’s a family ring.” He added. “I don’t believe in marriage.”

I sipped my coffee and said, “Is that cuz of Sarah?”

Now let me take the time in telling you I got a 1300 on my SAT, I maintained a 3.5 in high school, and before I dropped out of college I was passing every class. But despite all of those numbers, I could still be stupid. Blame it on the emotion of the situation, blame it on the fact that I’m bad with conversation, blame it on the alcohol that had given me plenty of practice through the years. Blame it on anything you want, but when I saw the vein in that stupid Mick’s head, I knew I had hit a nerve with the force of a .50 caliber bullet.

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, “And who told you about Sarah?” he said through gritted teeth.

“Just tell me where she is okay.” I said calmly but spewing anxiety.

“That whore left town right after her boyfriend got killed.” I could see his mouth twitch like he was happy.

“And who killed him?”

“I think we gotta troublemaker in here.” He shouted in a raised voice.

“Just tell me where she is, I know you did something to her.” I yelled back. This got the entire place’s attention.

“Yeah? She didn’t stick around long enough to get what was comin!”

“And what was that?”

“Here you can pass it on to her when you see her in hell!” He rolled up his sleeves and lunged at me. I spilled my coffee on his eyes and we grappled on the ground. Before I could hit him, my fists were being held by two other drunks, and I was being tackled by a third. I was on the ground with four guys on me trying to suffocate me. Then I managed to grab one guy’s arm and bite it. He screamed, and I jabbed at his teeth, which fell like a rock climber without a rope. I started kicking and moving my legs, while simultaneously head locking the guy with no front teeth. I got another fist free and crashed them both like symbols on McCreedy’s head. I elbowed Toothy for good measure and then spun out of the mob’s grip. I grabbed a shot glass and slammed it against thug number two’s forehead, who looked a little like my dad. Pops screamed and I lunged and tackled him. I got on my knees and held his throat as I delivered a knockout punch. At the instant I turned around, thug number three avalanched on top of me. Of all the guys he slobbered the most. So Spitty got one in the family jewels and then got a crown on his head from my now broken hand. Finally there was Petey.

We exchanged bruises until I finally got him in a nelson. I slammed his head against a table and screamed. “What did you do with her?! Who did you send after her?!”

“If the guys I sent after her had found her, she’d have been on the news by now! But hey, be patient, I’m sure she’ll turn up.” He mocked cruelly. At that moment cops came rushing in and hit us both. I was knocked out before I heard the siren.

I woke up in a holding cell. Apparently I’m too good of a fighter. When a bald cop saw me awake, he called out for some guy named Pickles. Or maybe it was Piggles. I couldn’t tell. Everything was blurry like a snowstorm without the snow. And it was hot. Pickles unlocked the cell and told me to come with him. He kind of looked like an albino pickle. We sat down and about fifteen minutes later I was aware enough to tell him my story.

“I don’t know if we can get charges on him. Depends if he talks anymore. But we might be able to look into the murder of the last guy. You never know. Funny thing, though, turns out the guy was gay that got murdered. So either he had the wrong hit or she was never cheating on him.”

“Allegedly?” I smirked

“Allegedly.” He smiled. “You’re free to go; no charges are being pressed by us or by the owner because, well, he’s kinda busy as you can imagine. We’ll look into your missing person. Maybe if we get this to the media she’ll see it and come out of hiding.”

I smiled. I knew she wasn’t coming out of hiding. I wasn’t planning on even going back to her house. Somehow I knew that the false accusation against her and her affair would reveal itself. She was too good for that. I walked out of that station proud of myself. I had been alcohol free for almost two months now and going strong. I was back on the narrow road between the ravines that were waiting to receive me when I relapsed. But I had regained my balance and was walking tall. And as the sunlight hit me, and spackled the dried blood on my lips and eyebrows, and screamed into my pupils, I felt something for the first time. I felt loved. I felt loved by God as if he himself had pulled me out of that mob and embraced me like a mother with her newborn baby.

It’s strange. This whole experience of losing Sarah has made me realize something. It’s not her I’ve been searching the streets for. It’s been Jesus. It’s been both of them. The day will come when I see her again, smiling, with open arms. Until then I’ll search madly. I will ransack the town looking for my savior. I will bellow their name and cry out to them for strength. I will scream to the skies to lead me to her. And when that day comes and I do find her, something miraculous and fantastical will occur that this world has not seen. Hell will freeze over and the volcanoes will spew ice and snow proclaiming the devil has been defeated. Thieves will come off of their crosses, households will be divided, investors will leave Wall Street, mob bosses will confess to the cops, the cancerous will be healed, dictators will hand over their power to their people, the very foundations of mankind will be destroyed because they are rooted in sin, and they will all join me in my rejoicing. We will all crowd the streets with mad dancing and praises that deafen the most wicked of deeds, and I will knock on every door of every house and I will proclaim, “I have found my Savior! I have found the one who believed in me when I was buried beneath my sin and pulled me out of my own self-loathing. And even in my darkest hour when the weight of my sins fell upon me and I thought he was not there, I fought ravenously as he pulled me towards him. And as the fighting got tougher, he shielded me from the dangers of the world and sacrificed himself so that I might find him, and Behold I have found him.” And I have. I, a wretched, heartbroken, desolate, barren wasteland of a human being have found the treasure that gives me everlasting life. Why has this happened? Because of Love. This existential happening came into being because one day the Creator of every microorganism, of every living thing, of every star, of every galaxy sent his son to take my place.

I will find Sarah. I will find her as surely as God has found me.

Tags: A Wretch, Aggies Author, William Blake
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