Omnia Posthac

He was twenty-nine years old before he saw the moon.

He tells me this at a party, a housewarming for a mutual friend that I’ve known since college and I think he has, too. I can't contain my giggles. I know it's the wine I’m drinking and the relationship I recently ended and the delicious freedom of speaking with an acquaintance that I will only see once this year. 

Never seen the moon? I crow. How is that possible, Ryan?

He'd seen our supernal lady sideways, of course. Through a glass darkly. Looked around her the way one looks at the sun thirty seconds before a total eclipse. Or, for that matter, the way one looks at her thirty seconds after a total eclipse. He thought his eyes might burn or his vision blur, anxious about too meager a sacrifice. He would be giving only his eyesight. It was a mutual respect, you see. Her out there and him right here. An admirer across the bar and just enough plausibility behind a free drink. A deference to lateral holiness.

I ask him what changed. He'd been camping with friends, he says. While sitting around a campfire — the only place sacrosanct enough for introductions to a heavenly body — someone mentioned the full moon. He cried, I think, or it may be that I picture him, eyes glistening, at the moment of his conversion. So much grace in a spiritual gambol.

Later, I look for her Waning Gibbous on my drive home. She is candescent over the high-desert plains even though we're in too much city out here. I crane my neck and watch as she fastens herself to the skyline behind a passing scope of clouds. She is full-bellied, like I am — one woman looking at another and seeing the pleasure of her own face. For there is no man on the moon, only a woman witnessing.

I feel like I've just donned glasses. I know that I am seeing the moon for the first time, too; I know that I am under some decent canopy even if I cannot see the whole of it, cannot see the murmuration of stars that cushion her. When I arrive home, she is already lambent through my bedroom window, taking up tomorrow’s light and twisting it, wringing out its rays. 

There is bravery in this, I wish I’d told him. To look her dead in the eyes and find the hereafter.