Do you remember that night on the 17th floor of paradise?
How the elevator took us up for like forever,
but in the hotel room glass, the city steel still loomed above us
and the clouds seemed nowhere closer?
It was there you told me
you wondered if God was even real.
Because if he was (always a he, God),
wouldn’t he be easier to find?
(But maybe that’s the thing about omnipotent people.
Sure, their power should be simple to find,
unless they don’t wanna be found.)
I told you
I wasn’t a person with answers,
I was just good at stories
and molding metaphors around questions,
but maybe if God was like a human,
he’d ghosted us long ago;
or maybe if God was like a cat,
he’d wander in the back door soon enough
and expect dinner in the form of worship;
or maybe if God was a mental illness
he birthed our compulsions and irrational urges
like
why’d the elevator stop at every floor
like
why’s anyone keeping a record for the highest building in the world
like
why does anybody live in a city that’s never silent
except to drown out their own thoughts?
(Drown you out, drown you out,
get away from me,
unseat my superstitious OCD.)
Maybe this despicable biblical umbilical cord
tying us to collective beliefs of chaos and order
serves no purpose once we’re free
and the leap faith requires is just
cutting it clean–
or maybe I know nothing
except the here and now and
what I wrote about that night,
but you remember it too, right?
The way
the clouds loomed
and the lightning flashed higher than any record
and the elevator in the hall dinged
even though it was empty
and we still had a word to call
the noise above the city
glorious.
***
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Jordyn Saelor 