The One Who Loved Everybody
Here is a city and here is a bar in the city and here is a man in the bar who is God, maybe, or something that got called God so many times it forgot what it was before. The neon is pink. The music is loud. You are here because you had nowhere else to go and he is here because he is always here, in the places people go when they have nowhere else.
Look at him. Go ahead. He won't mind.
You have been told your whole life that God is a door that stays closed. That there is a list and you are on the wrong side of it. That the body you have is a problem to be solved, a wound requiring treatment, a letter written in a language nobody holy wants to read. You have been told this by people who meant it kindly. That's the part that stays. That's the part that got into the walls.
And then there is this: Judas at the bar, drinking something red, beautiful the way people are beautiful when they're about to ruin everything. The thing about Judas is he always came back. All evening, every evening — stepped outside, came back, ordered another round, looked at Jesus the way you look at something you've already decided to lose. Jesus let him look. Put his hand over Judas's hand on the bar and didn't say anything for a long time and the silence had a shape to it, had heat, had the particular weight of two people who know each other past the point of explanation. Then he said I know and meant it the way you mean something when you've already grieved it, when the knowing has been inside you so long it's become a room you live in.
Judas laughed. Not meanly. The way you laugh when someone has seen you completely and you don't know what to do with that except laugh or leave.
He left. Jesus watched him go. Held the door with his eyes until it closed. This is the part that gets me on the floor every time — not the betrayal, not the wood and the nails and all the rest of it, but this: the watching. The not-stopping. Holding the knowing like you hold a year you can't get back, like you hold the last conversation, like you hold a body that has already decided. He knew what Judas's hand felt like under his. He knew and he watched him go and he turned back to his drink and the drink was warm.
There's a drag queen who won't let him near her. She was a youth pastor once. She knows every word he knows and she has paid for that knowledge in ways that left marks and she is not interested in his hands on her face, his especially you, his making-it-okay. She has earned the flinch. The flinch is hers.And he dances badly near her, desert-cracked enormous hands, just — present. Just on the floor. Not healing anything.
You want him to fix it. I know you do. You want the intervention, the this was wrong, what they did to you was wrong, I will make it right. Instead you get I know. Instead you get him sitting there while you tell him everything — the thing about the church and the thing about your body and the thing about the years you spent trying to be a door that opened for everyone except yourself — and he just listens. Holds it. Doesn't flinch.
Is that enough. I'm asking. I've been asking.
Because here is the bouncer with the scar and here is the bartender three months sober his hands still shaking when he pours and here are two people in a booth who have been together nineteen years, one of them sick, holding hands so hard the knuckles have gone pale — nineteen years — and Jesus is crying into his drink, quiet, not because it's sad although it is sad it's devastating, but because he can feel all of it at once, the bass and the wine going warm and Judas not coming back inside and the nineteen years and the heat of a hand under his hand, the nerve endings wide open, no way to turn it down, and I want to grab him by the collar and say why weren't we better, why didn't we deserve what you actually were, look at what we did with you, look at what got done in your name to everyone in this bar.
He would do it again. That's the thing. You could walk him through the whole story — the crowd and the wood and Judas's mouth on his cheek in the garden, the particular way a kiss can be a knife — and he would still come in out of the desert. He would still sit down next to you. He would still put his hand over your hand and wait.
Like he doesn't already know. Like the knowing isn't already there in his hands.
And you do. Of course you do.
You've been waiting your whole life for someone to ask.
