or multiple heavens. Oh I’ve been to heaven too, that’s another reason I can tell you God exists. She had just landed next to me and I was in such a haze. My mind was a clear sky preoccupied with the word “oh”. I was in orbit. I asked perhaps and she laughed a laugh I didn’t know would be as hard or as beautiful as that 2. It was the sound of a bluebird who only tilts his head as you get closer. Who invents new types of flowers in its eyes but hasn’t shown them to a soul yet. A bluebird laugh that sent me—where do you go when you’re already in outer-space? Heaven. That’s where. Gods can be anywhere. I used to think it was stupid that the Ancient Greeks believed their Gods lived at the top of a very climbable mountain. Did no one 16 Pillars of Salt
scale Mount Olympus to check if there was anything up there other than wrung out trees? Ridiculous then, but now I think I get it. The hill behind my house hardly qualifies as a mountain but it gets me high enough to look down and see the canyon like a blanket crumpled around my feet. My hill used to be called Merrimac because that’s the name of the neighboring street. Merrimac the street is, in my heart, what it would be like if a river could run upwards. It sweeps me up to where I’m supposed to be. I never told her the hill was named Merrimac so she named it “God’s Hill” after a daydream that became a memory. Daydreams become memories sometimes, and that is her. You’ve met her is the thing, you just didn’t
hold her eyes for long enough. The day I took her up to God’s Hill I remember light poured into half of her left eye and it was beautiful 3. In some places her iris looked like a lake that had been kept sacred by the rocks around it and in others it looked like a honeycomb guarding the light. The corner where the sun came streaming in filled up the web with honey and I felt myself eased into something untouchable. If you doubt me still, I dare you to go outside right now, eat a flower whole, and tell me that you don’t worship the earth. 1 As the word honeymoon sounds on your tongue. 2 It was beautiful in the way that water is beautiful early in the morning. 3 This understanding of the word “beautiful” has more of a warmth to it.
Willa Frierson ‘20
