When I was younger, I used to sleep with the closet door open. Most kids prefer to sleep with the closet door closed, because they don't want to know what creepy thing is in there. And if they do think something is coming after them, they pull the covers up over their head and hide, as if a thin layer of blankets will stop the claws of a horrible monster. Me, I would stay awake with the closet door open, blankets up to my nose, staring into the dark because I wanted to see it coming.
But I do understand why kids pull the blankets over their heads. It's because there's a certain comfort in not knowing. When you don't know for sure what's coming, you can imagine the best thing...or the worst thing.
When I was in high school, I had a crush on a girl named Shelly. She was a close friend of mine, but I didn't tell her how I felt for a really long time. Before I told her, I could imagine all sorts of things. I could imagine that she was feeling the same way, that she was head over heels in love with me and she was just waiting for me to say something. Or, I could imagine that she didn't feel the same way at all; that she would recoil in horror or burst out laughing. I spent a lot of time going back and forth between these two possibilities. I was comfortable living in this tension; in a world where both the best possible and the worst imaginable could be true, and knew that in knowing the truth, both worlds would be shattered and only the mundane actual would exist.
Many of us live life like this. With the covers pulled up over our heads, not wanting to see what's coming. The news could be the best possible or the worst imaginable. It's how a lot of people deal with God and what happens after you die too.
Me, I want to see it coming.
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