Touch-starved and touch-terrified: you worry your skin wafts waves of desperation detectable by contact, and though the one thing you want is to grab hold of something and never let go, the very wanting makes you unworthy. If you touch them, they'll know. If your aching hands find a moment's fullness, then by God, you'll leach the light from the sun.

I left my hands at the door. My feet, too. My knees, elbows, vertebrae scatter in my wake, so many breadcrumbs; my skin flutters in graceful tatters and my veins waver in the breeze, deprived of their destinations. My rib cage stands open, my heart beating a tattoo into the skyline.     I'm bleeding into this city and I fear it is too big, too broad, too busy to catch me as I fall.     But the reddening glint of the skyline tonight reminds me: I needed to be taken apart in order to be remade.

I.     When I was three, I believed God was a man in the clouds with a white beard and a fathomless smile who breathed life into the mother I loved.     When I was four, I saw my mother struck down for the first time—struck down by loss, by absence, by an emptiness that followed her, shredded her, her very own poltergeist, a phantom whose violence mangled her soft, loving face.     The fire that filled me then I believed was His: I believed He wanted me to stand up and push back and fight for a woman on her knees. So, with little more than gentle words and the two small hands I’d been given, that’s what I did.     When I was five, I saw that there is more than one ghost in this world—that sometimes ghosts come from warm bodies, hot tempers, cold shoulders, and I saw all the ways my world was haunted. I saw the hollow eyes, the bowed shoulders, and for some reason this, this, convinced me that the world breathed with me, that there was life outside of me; that God hadn’t stopped His work with my mother, and now, neither should I. So I stood up. I pushed back. I fought for the people on their knees.     When I was seven, I found God in a boy—not a prophet, not a saint, but a boy with dark, floppy hair, sparkling eyes, and a smile fathomless as the sea. I’d been fighting for other people my whole life. I’d never had someone fight for me.     I grew up. My God transformed. He wasn’t a He, or a She, or a They, or an It. God grew into a wordless feeling in my chest, a perfect moment, suspended in amber, impossible to describe but in charcoal and paints:     The glint of dawn across the fog-swathed bridge. Ma’s laugh when she burned the Christmas roast. The way his hair fell across his eyes.     The car-horn-and-cigarette-smoke heartbeat of the city. Soft voices in the long hours of morning. The warmth of her arms, big enough for two.     Her eyes, gleaming with love and fever. The last time I held her hand in mine.     His gentle smile as he led me home.     God was a moment of beauty, of belonging— stunning; fleeting.     They shipped him away. I wondered whether there was any God at all. I wondered, if He wanted me to fight, why He left me marooned, my last gasp torn from my lungs, my hard-won breath handed a gun he never wanted and made to fight a war he did everything in his power to protect me from.     I wondered why, in order to quench the flames in me, in order to fulfill God’s mission for me, I had to betray the first person to show me what God really was.     I stood up. I pushed back. I fought for a world on its knees. The boy who’d shown me God fought with me, and I knew he didn’t believe, not really, not anymore, but he fought as he always had: for me. And I never stopped believing. I thanked my God every day. I thanked that boy every day.     He went to his knees and I went to mine.     II.     I awoke from dreamless sleep, a nightmare sleep, just one lung and half a heart lurching forward because I’d never learned how to stop. I had my very own poltergeist— I had an army of them, phantoms of a life long since lost sinking claws into my throat, mangling my insides. It was sickness again, my ribs rattling like they used to, only there was no tonic for it this time—there was no warmth from a mother’s arms, no God to grow me another lung, no boy pressing me down, letting me rest.     I couldn’t rest. Sleep was my first fear.     My second was him.     My last was myself.     At first, before I knew, before I saw, I did what I’d always done: I stood up. I pushed back. I fought for a world on its knees. He could break them all. He could break me.     Funny enough, he did.     The fight was over. The heroes prevailed. The world got up again and I didn’t. I couldn’t.     Because it was him. God. My God.     Too-long hair fell across too-bright eyes, but he was there— my most violent phantom; a decimating shade, real again— and for the first time in a long time, I believed.     More than that, I understood.     See, I always thought I’d been made to stand up. To push back. To fight. Stalwart and steady and true. But the real truth, I know as the weight of the world slides from my shoulders, is that my mission is much smaller and sweeter and braver than that.     I go, grateful, to my knees and down, further— I fall.     I surrender to the only real God I ever knew, to the only faith and the only mission and the only home I ever needed:     to a moment; to a man.     I wouldn’t be standing here now without him.     III.     When I was three, I believed God was a man in the clouds. I was wrong. He’s here on Earth, and I’ll drown in his smile again if it kills me.

Oh, to be that star on the horizon: to have died a trillion years ago and still be shedding light.

I finally understand why people describe compatibility as chemistry.     Chemical reactions occur when two substances meet by chance and change each other, take each other apart, eat up each other's pieces and produce something new.     These reactions can galvanize, energize; they can produce air and water and heat and light. A chain of them can power a star until it grows and grows, and then explodes, and creates new stars, new planets, and the seeds of new life.     Chemistry, like love, is a process of creation, and the reactants are not made for each other, but they are more and better together.

A star is such a lonely thing; its neighbors live a thousand years away in all directions. And yet when the night is darkest, coldest, clearest -- when the air bites my lungs, and I find myself detached, deserted, aching -- there they are. Tiny lights, a thousand years away.       A star is such a lonely thing. But seeing it, somehow, I feel less alone.