The setting sun did nothing to diminish the stifling thickness of the air. The blended clear of fire-tinted indigo, dotted by the emerging stars, innumerable angel eyes. It was some untouchable fixation, found only with flashing lights, mingled voices, bodies pressed together, hands lifted. Fingers splayed wide against the breeze, curling and unfolding into…

“Adios!”

“Hasta levista!”

It was the ungraspable thing of steady rhythm, the flinging of loose hair, the flash of bright wet eyes from flushed skin. Of turning and shouting with hoarse voices the things you don’t want to stand for anymore.

“I’m done with friends and their opinions of us “close-minded Christians”!”

It was in the circle. With backs bent and heads pressed together, hands grasping each other’s. It was in the realization of never being alone again, that the hands that held yours would keep you standing, that somehow we’d never let anyone else fall further than we did ourselves. It was in the feel of sweaty palms, skin on skin, in the barely-heard cry of “Father God.”

Somehow through the darkening of the sky and the swaying of hips beside hips close enough to be your own… it was a relinquishing, a surrender.

“Everybody’s got junk.”
It was the unbound energy of a tarnished, broken, shattered soul who found it wasn’t worth going it alone. It was the acceptance of unworthiness in every trembling nerve, every threaded finger, every arm flung round the neck of sisters, bonded by something more.

It was us. It was us with Him, beneath an ocean sky. And it would be enough to last a lifetime. Because a lifetime is all we have.