When it came time to grieve and declaim against my trials, I did what they said and looked for ***.

I stomped through the beginning of sentences and over proper nouns, extracting those capital letters as they towered over the others for my examination.
But there was nothing. No God was to be found in these looming behemoths, stern and forbidding, demanding respect, but skinny-legged and hollow.

I broadened my journey, crawled through the lower-cases too, thinking maybe god would choose to mingle in the everyday. And mine was an everyday agony, something I slept with and woke up with, brushed my teeth to and got dressed by.
But god was absent in the crowds, not to be amongst found the jostling bulgings, pokings, and high-rise delusions of these the everyday letters.

And I stumbled, tripped and broke my heart on the smallest of words.
The He-God once had my father’s face and I would make promises to Him that I meant to keep but always broke with guilty heart. Now He only has my father’s anger and disappointment. And lately, it is tinged with a sense of failure – His, not mine.
And the She-God was something red and nebulous, weaving and fading away, something I was afraid of on a much deeper level, something that made my guts coil in discomfort.
And It was wood. A block of wood. Dead tree in a vacuum.
And there was I.

I searched throughout the alphabet, and for good measure, I went through the punctuation too.
I put in dashes, to replace the vowels. But vowels are the water of language. Without them the tongue shrivels up, twists itself into a knot that can be loosened only with the cooling of flowing ees. It was all or nothing, I decided. I would have them all – all five and y, dashes be damned – or I would lock them away and begin a life of abstinence, become a saint wandering in the scorching desert.

I refuse to consider the declamatory exclamation mark. My god, I have decided, does not scream, does not roar, not if god loves me, knowing already that my head is too weighted with sound.
And the question mark is too frightening a thing, a shattered circle, containing nothing and everything. But this is God, they say. The beginning before the beginning. The end after. But that, I reply, is not a question mark. Is not a period, promising finality. Nor the wishy-washy ellipses, always “no comment.”

I am at the asterisk now. Silence in star-shaped bursts.

* And am still searching.