Page 90 of Saint
“Okay,” I said back. I would listen. It would help. I’d write Elijah a note to explain that it wasn’t his fault, and then I’d make sure everything was turned off upstairs because he hated when I left the lights on and wasted electricity, even when it was just the bathroom light so I didn’t stub my toe in the middle of the night.
It was time.
I felt the certainty of that like I’d never felt anything before. It was time. I’d pretended long enough, and the less pretending had worked, the harder I’d pretended, and now it was time.
But something happened then, as I made to stand. Something that took me a minute to understand. My phone, sitting on the floor next to me, lit up with a text notification.
At three thirty in the morning.
In the dark, it felt like a searing brightness, a klieg light, a bluish sun dawning right there in the shadows. And when I reached for it out of sheer habit and opened it up, it glowed as bright as the inside of the Ark of the Covenant.
It was from a number I didn’t have in my contacts or even recognize—a number that I’d never even exchanged texts with before. There was only the one text, the one line, with no context whatsoever.
I lift my eyes to the hills.
Why did that sound familiar? And who would be texting me at three in the morning with something as cryptic as this? Since dating Elijah, I’d stopped with the hardcore party crowd...and even if one of those douchebags was going to text me this late, it would definitely be a video of him stumbling home drunk and singing in the middle of the street. Not a...was this averse? It felt familiar like a verse would. Like a poem we’d read in school, or...
I pulled up the browser on my phone and typed in the words, which immediately returned with Psalm 121.
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth...
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber...
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in
from this time on and forevermore.
The words bled through me—no, theyburnedthrough me. Like fire. Like light.
I lift my eyes to the hills...
I switched back to the text message and repliedwho is this?
But there was no answer—in fact, there hasn’t been an answer for five years. To this day, I still don’t know who texted me the first verse of a psalm at three thirty in the morning.
To this day, I still don’t know who saved my life.
I lift my eyes to the hills...
Those words sent something through me that was not darkness, that was not un-feeling. I felt...comforted. Like the need I’d had for my mother to chase away the monsters under the bed could still be met, like someone could still do that for me, and it was this god who never slumbered or slept, this god who cared about my goings out and my comings in. This lord who wouldkeepme, even if I didn’t deserve to be kept. He could keep my life, hewouldkeep my life, and soon it wasn’t enough to see the verses on the screen, I needed to see them on paper. I went over to the bookshelves by the fireplace, which mostly held video games and every year’s edition of theGuinness Book of World Recordsand found the small leather bible my grandparents had given me at my confirmation.
And there it was printed plain as day: this god would never sleep, he would help me. If I lifted my eyes to the hills, even in the darkest hours of night, he would be there.
Maybe...
Maybe it, with its silky, smoky voice, was wrong. Maybe it had been wrong for a long time.
And that was enough to push me away from what I had been about to do. Not certainty and not logic and not even a happy feeling to counterweight the heaviness of its seduction—but the sudden revelation that my thoughts, my hollowness, its whispers were somehow not the entire story.
There was something more. To me. To life.
