Levitation | Michael Raqim Mira
A stained wedding gown hanging in a dusty closet is how you grieve without a sound. A failed marriage and not marrying the man she truly loved in college was how to perfectly control numbness: surgically remove a beating heart, place it on the altar of an empty chapel, and shoot it with a suppressed pistol.
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That gown was the first thing she showed me when I interviewed her after her husband was shot in the back of the head in a rice field. She tells me that was not the first time she cried over him. Before, he would come home drunk, then beat her while laughing maniacally.
When he died, she felt two emotions: pain and ecstasy.
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Teresa of Avila levitated under the tip of Cupid’s arrow, her fragile body being ripped cell by cell as carnal pain and divinity pulled her at the ends like an archer’s bowstring.
She defined the term total surrender, meaning to offer your entire being to what God had written for you, even if your fate is written in blood.
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Her daughter pulled her hand, leading us to the rice terrace where a white, wooden cross marks the spot of a buried treasure chest. Her daughter’s pull is too strong for her frail, aging body. Her feet are staked to the ground, but her child is straining the umbilical cord connected to her torso, trying to drag her to the memory of a man she once loved.
She loved another man once. He, too, is gone now. These loves, she thinks to herself, are like that unicorn on a carousel she tried to reach as a child at the annual fair. She could never see it clearly through the motion blur as the mythical creature ran round and round until its magic lost its gloss.
In the Earth’s gravitational field, she is being pulled in every direction. She says a prayer and the words become an unwritten contract. She says she will always love him. What she really meant to say is, “We’re both free now.”
About the Author:
Michael Raqim Mira is a writer, photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, and podcaster based in Texas. His website is www.michaelrmira.com.