Burning through our darkness.

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear

with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth

and everything done in it will be laid bare.”

2 Peter 3:10

Dear Me,

They say you look like her in your blood-red prom dress, hair high on your head. She wore almost the same one a few years back, and you’re even shown the video. She was different than you, dark-headed but there’s that same reserved, careful look of a Catholic girl out of her element.

She’s going on a trip with her fiancé, and you imagine the “one day” of something like that. You’re a junior in high school–untethered, unleashed–and the thought of going anywhere with anyone outside a sixty-mile radius is unfathomable, let alone Hawaii.

That day, her mother is walking with your mother around the neighborhood and her father has a golf game scheduled later that afternoon with your own. But you sit early in the morning, eating Kashi cereal, “rabbit food,” your friend Jamie says as you two loiter the morning away in homeroom, her pretending to read and you pretending to enjoy cereal that tastes like it was intended for small mammals.

But then something happens that you’re not expecting. One of your other teachers barges in and turns on the TV. “You have to watch the news,” she says, scrolling until you see one tower, then two, the first crumbling into itself like a mindless game of Jenga. The second one’s still standing, but suddenly it isn’t because a plane has flown unabashedly, unreservedly into its mirrored-faced side.

All those people.

You watch them hold hands and jump, and you blink away the thought of what they’re jumping into. It’s a vast canvas of sky, and that’s all the camera will show–them out into the ether, nobody knowing (but of course you know) the ending, the outcome.

You know your parents are home, but you’re terrified for them. And when you get called to the principal’s office, your heart stops.

They’re fine.

But she’s not.

“She was on the second plane,” your father says, his face lost at what this day has become. He’s supposed to be on his way to a golf game with her father, and instead, all of you are crammed into their living room, holding your breath, confirming what you already know.

That night you dream the world’s on fire, and it’s the most vivid, terrifying dream you’ve had to date. It’s just you standing alone in a sea of what seems like lava, the fire melting into itself, set against the darkest night.

That dream haunts you for years until the one year you give it back to Him. One day, your finger scrolling against the black ink of your Bible, you find it. A verse that explains what you saw. But this time, there’s no fear there. There’s just an understanding that all these things we do to each other are an unbridled evil that will come to justice, His justice.

And there He stands burning through our darkness like diamonds refined in fire.

Talk soon,

Ericka