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As I walked home from the subway tonight I was reminded about my relationship to life in a flash of reminiscence. I moved to NYC in January of 2009, starry eyed and lugging two practically bursting suitcases through Penn Station. I couldn’t believe the energy and music of the city that surrounded me! NYC had a heartbeat all of its own, and I wanted to write every poem in the world about her. The first weeks were a blur of joy and newness. Everything was an adventure to be had: the people, the subway, the boroughs, the neighborhoods, the smells, and -though sometimes I seemed to forget- my new classes and college too.
My most lucid memory from those initial months takes me up an off-limits fire escape. I climbed several stories high before ascending a rickety ladder and pulling myself onto the landing with no guardrail. It was the middle of January and although the winter air bit my nose, the midnight sky was so clear that outlines of several stars dusted the sky. I sat on the ground and pulled my arms around my legs as I shivered in wonder at the magical scene before me: the moon shone so bright that Manhattan lights could not overwhelm it. It was brilliant, beautiful, bright.
Tonight I was relative to the moon in the same way I once had been only a few weeks shy of six years before. The same New York moon glowed in the cloudless sky like embers, hot and white. Almost six years have passed and my life has changed drastically, yet when I looked at the moon tonight, time stood still and I flew back to January, 2009. There I was, a college kid, standing before the smoldering orb’s glory with a heart full of hope and a head full of dreams. As my glance moved from the moon back to the sidewalk and back into 2014, an inaudible Voice whispered sweet assurance in the deep caverns of my mind “even more than the moon, still I remain.”
Those whispered, voiceless words are life to me.
Although these last six years of flux feel like they will never end, tonight’s moon reminded me that God’s faithful, unending, enduring love never changes. No matter where I am in life– whether as college student trespassing on a fire escape to gaze at the moon, or as an adult trudging home from the subway–I or my circumstances may change, but He does not.
Ruthie Bird 