The Holy Haunting Blues

Facing Disrepair with Prayer

As my rounded brown cheeks flush with the feeling of faith, my knees dig themselves deep into the brown, rugged carpet. With hard-pressed fingers too glued to pry apart, my heavy eyelids weigh down on the glossy sockets underneath them. From here, I am ready, and as soon as my mind begins to reel, I feel it; an impending presence behind my back, looming in wait to take my breath away.

Do you remember when prayer was once like this? Little did I know how close I was to bliss, keeping my past times prioritized at the age of five. Yet, as that time pressed on, the once bright dawn turned to goo, leaving me downright blue between scenes of abysmal obscenity.

Before I could curb the monstrous iceberg, I found myself submerged in the chilling gloom of depression. My once-warm atoms shifted over to ice, leaving both body and mind benign. Sucked in deep, I could barely see in front of me between the mean vocabulary swirling in my brain and the mind-altering substances adding to my pain.

In all that time, walking blindly, I could not shake the feeling that something big, something mighty, crept right behind me each time I looked over my shoulder. A haunting shade of crisp black stalking you at the rear is not the brightest way to spend your endless numbered days. Not only was I falling into insanity, but also wholly rolling in my fears. There was no clarity to any part of me. You could describe me as undead, grasping frantically for any semblance of serenity, moaning and groaning with my fellow mellowed zombies.

What a frightening life it is without any of your senses. How petrifying, the little our eyes can see or our nostrils can breathe when rolling in the mean inky deep. After spending so long without a song to sing, no joy to bring, or anything to keep me tethered to this earth, I had to find the jolt to smack me back into reality. Most importantly, I had to face the looming shadow seemingly destined to trail me.

And so, with leaded legs, I leaped forwards into any action that might counter that warm breath of death on the nape of my neck. From yoga to hiking to healthy eating, board game beatings, and therapy meetings, nothing remained left behind to try to incline my mind back to its previous space in time. Running for so long, the song that needed sung to find this battle won remained trapped in my lungs. Better than any coping strategy, I knew the sun would only shine again when I opened my eyes to face the nameless presence behind me, the shadow eternally waiting to pounce.

There was only one thing left to do. Within the green thickets, between ancestors made of timeworn bark, I stepped forwards into the forest to find my courage, face the inky space shadowed upon my shoulders. With a steady breath and a pulsing chest, I turned deliberately to see, finally, what had crept behind me for two decades.

And would you look at that!? All this time, with death in mind, my senses never realized the shadowed aura trailing my body was never a gooey black. The shadow meant to haunt me was my favorite shade of blue, the navy hue I fell in love with way back then, with knees dug deep into the earth underneath me.

It sounds impossible, yes, but all this time, the looming ghost I kept in a haunting space was the face of myself. The full-fledged self I could always see present in the world of prayer was finally apparent when I looked in the mirror. How in heaven did I not sense this before? Kneeling in orison always felt like surfacing for air each time my thoughts sat in a jumble of layers. The world would always clear when my fear was faced with holy grace, an overwhelming reminder of the power bred within faith.

In full thanks to the trees, I reached a state of re-entry with the soul I remembered being at the tender age of five. As my lips continue to kiss the words of scripture, my haunting hue, now a burning blue, has become the thing to bring me back to one piece. So very fooled, I believed my world to be clouded and rounded out by the inky ghost of death. But now, my sixth sense’s wide eyes can see the blessed works of perceptivity. I am me, the exact one the Lord meant me to be, not because of perfection, but in place of my mind’s murderous fallacies.

My favorite shade of navy still holds the capacity to turn bleak, as it seems we never altogether lose those voices in the void meant to keep us buried deep. The penultimate difference is that I’ve now found a way to dig my rugged knees into my faith. That funny feeling I can’t help but sense? I now know its fate, willing me to face the world. Spiritually armed and steady, I stand hand in hand with the one above, now ready to resoundingly roar an ‘Amen!’ to the tinted beasts meant to haunt us indubitably.