Free From – Chapter 7 – July 7th

I hope you will join me this month as we JOURNEY each day through our short story. It is about finding FREEDOM in the midst of all the captivating pieces in life that steal our peace which we need FREE FROM!

FREE FROM
July 7, 2021

Proverbs 13:9, ‘The lives of good people are brightly lit streets; the lives of the wicked are dark alleys.’ (MSG)

Chapter 7

Annie had always been. Simple as. Suddenly that’s how Legend felt. There had never been a time in his life when she hadn’t existed. Seamlessly, she became. When they were apart, which any moment away from Annie was one moment too long, he felt odd, like a goldfish out of its bowl, a bird pushed from its nest, a hermit crab no longer connected to its shell. He hadn’t had her in his life for the first twenty years, so he was determined to not waste another precious second, in the hopes to make up for the precious seconds that had already been wasted.
She was something else. He was lost trying to decide how this had happened. Her eyes were deep pools he swam in ‘til he had to come up for air and her voice was laced with hypnotic qualities like one of those soothing readers paid handsomely to put people in trances and to sleep. Her smile reminded him of the sun rising over the mountain and her touch was healing every aching crevice inside of him. Before he knew it, he could not take a breath apart from her, and he wondered what he’d done to exist for all the years leading to now. Perhaps that’s why he had failed so miserably at life; he hadn’t been sutured to his soulmate, his tapestry was missing the threads that wove her to him, and surely, she was the missing piece to the puzzle of him, the one he had been searching for all his life.
As luck would have it, she felt equally about him, and that truth stole the air right from his lungs. He may have been a town’s legend, but he had never before been someone’s hero. She looked at him with those gigantic eyes and a look of awe on her flawless face and it melted him like wax. He’d find himself just a puddle of need at her mercy. She said he made her a better person, but she completed him and made him whole. It was sickening, really. They lived in their own little bubble; it was terrifying and comforting and complete.
Annie’s world had been just as empty and complicated as his and he ached for the holes he found in her from time to time. There was an endless trail of busted pieces rising to the surface on occasion and the brokenness and hopelessness that absorbed Annie shattered him. Because he knew what the hurt felt like; he understood the fear, loathed the insecurity, hated the neediness that never having been loved before created in someone’s soul. That constant peering in the mirror of yourself, trying to decipher what was wrong with you; attempting to always be someone you weren’t just to be noticed and accepted. Selling your soul for shekels just to belong.
“Then I found Jesus,” she confessed early on. “Rather, He found me. That changed everything.” Her smile lit up the corner of his flat like it was morning. They’d moved beyond the initial introductions and had entered tedious territory, realizing they had common threads woven through their childhoods which continued to haunt both of them. Legend cried actually when she described the boyfriends of her mom, one after another, who had used her while her mother looked the other way. He considered how difficult for her to silently wish she knew who her father was besides a night’s stand when all he had ever wanted was to not know his dad at all. She had fantasized fairy tales where her dad was a Knight in Shining Armor riding in on a mustang to rescue you out of the hands of her mother’s pimps, and he still had nightmares of how he would someday kill his father. He didn’t remember much about his mom; she’d left when he was pretty young, leaving him to protect himself, and Annie had never known her dad. He hadn’t spoken to or seen his own father since returning from the war, and Annie guessed her mom was dead by now. They joked that maybe their parents had all ended up with one another.
They were settled on his floor (he didn’t have many furnishings) on a particularly rainy afternoon where the sky had wept for hours and the chill clung to the edges of his flat and ran down the walls. Legend wanted to punch something; he would have protected her had he known her then.
“How did you endure it and still manage to graduate with honors?” he asked, in awe. She too had finished a year early and left for college as soon as she could, peeling off the years of her messed up home-life like layer after layer of dead skin from a bad sunburn.
Annie shrugged, a trait that endeared her to him even more; she shrugged a lot. “Jesus,” she said, her grin eating the word like an ice cream cone. Legend looked at her quizzically, and she shrugged again. It was like the sun had just moved out from behind a cloud it had been hiding behind when Annie smiled.
“Who’s that?” He felt stupid, like he should know. “You mean, like God?” His voice was incredulous.
Annie nodded slowly, followed by her famous smile. “Yes,” she whispered, “He found me in an alley where I had been left for dead. That squeeze of my mom’s hadn’t much liked when I threw his drink in his face. He beat me pretty good and drug me out into the alleyway and dropped me. Jesus showed up right on time.” The tears trickled down her face. “I was as big as he was; I never figured out how he carried me. But he did. He hauled me home like I was a newborn infant, so gingerly, and laid me on the lap of this humongous black lady. Bonnie and Clyde,” she smiled softly, “that’s the first time I felt love was from those two. He was white and tiny; she was black and huge. Their hearts devoured all the evil I had ever known. She laid hands on me and prayed. Lawd, could that woman pray.” Annie peered with fondness at a memory only she could relive. “Their Jesus took all my shame and heaped it on Himself, all my pain too. Gave me a brand-new heart. Hmm-mmm, I miss them everyday. But now I have Jesus to soak up all the disgrace I was drowning in. Now I have you too.” Her cheeks glowed while a smile gobbled up her face.
Legend had never known someone like that. He pushed his lips together and squeezed his eyes shut. Quietly, “Can I know this Jesus too?”

To Be Continued…