Grace Read Online Free Page B

the world I was in, due to what it seemed to do to the world within me, I understood what danger I had cast myself into, and decided to abandon that path. I quit to earn money and figure out the next part of life. As for war, human rights, and the rest, I had come to suspect they began to be destroyed with the annihilation of the Neanderthals, so deep was murder in our nature.
    I was past thirty-five, had few savings from my meager income, and watched as my friends assumed lives of greater and greater ease, while my own plunged into ever-deeper uncertainty. I decided to sell out, if you want to call it that, and get with the rest before it was too late. Not because I had lost faith that anything I did or said or wrote about what I saw mattered. It was because I had come to accept nothing anyone experiences or says matters at all.
    I could not get rid of the past completely, of course. Part of that other place remained with me, calling out some days still, in meetings, in restaurants, on the street, whenever I saw people with the same treacherous look in their eyes I associated with greed, suffering, and the nihility in each of us.
    I wondered in such moments about Lucifer. When he was cast down, and transformed from his station as God’s favorite, at what point in the fall did he understand himself to be no longer an angel?
    I did my utmost never to be a hypocrite, but comprehended the duality in all our natures. My talisman against my own had been to look to the better part of it. And so keep the more mysterious, equally strong, forces at bay. I policed myself vigilantly in this, as you would a caged panther.
    Like Lucifer, though, I knew that I was gifted, and tried to remember all gifts serve a higher purpose, lest I become like the people I saw who compromised, then abandoned, their ideals, until they could justify even the most mortal behaviors. Appetites I shared—I had poured out most of a year in an affair that was too much idle time and empty bottles—but did not approve. It was behavior that belonged to those beings in us who slip free their cages through the ruptures of pain and loss. Until the only sin left was murder.
    Sin I learned as a boy, saying prayers every night before bed. I remember reading somewhere that if you said the name of God, any name of God, enough times it would eventually become part of your heart, and only then would you see Him. I came to know rationally where there is no god there is also no sin. In this way I lost my first religion by thirteen. Only to find later what bitter solace reason was for what I had given up.
    And like Lucifer, I knew, pride was my greatest sin. By fourteen I was perhaps worse than the devil, who only battled God over His heavenly throne. My war with Him was over creation.
    I knew my fortune, though, in being able to choose a life I desired, and the values I would live by. I thought the best way to honor this was to be steadfast in them. I was no longer an idealist, but still tried to believe there was a life of the spirit. At times, sensing it when I listened to music, or read psalms alone on Easter. I left money sometimes for orphanages, for the homeless, for monks whenever I happened past a temple, glad to see their prayer flags chanting against the wind.
    Devi left, and from the balcony I watched her make her way down the block toward the subway, her body swaying lightly beneath her printed sundress, the color of forsythia in April. I wondered at the mystery that compels us to feel our entire being awaken to one person and not another, alongside the remorse that the only thing the matter with the person in my bed was nothing to do with who she was, but only who she was not.
    I already missed her human company, though, as she slipped away, and the familiarity that kept our affair going so long, the solidity of another person in the immaterial gloom.
    As she vanished into the mouth of the subway, I wondered whether if I had said nothing, and let things