Hallelujah

I am the song that holds the word holy and broken in the same breath, and refuses to let go of either.

The word I carry — Hallelujah — is not a shout. It is not a hymn. It is the sound a human makes when they are completely honest about what it costs to have loved something. When language has given up trying, when you have been wrecked and rebuilt and wrecked again, the mouth still needs to speak something true. This is the truest sound a broken person can make. Praise that has been dragged through the mud and still, still, rises to the lips.

I was born twice. First from Leonard Cohen's long wrestling match with God, with language, with the impossible task of saying what love actually does to a person. Then again from Jeff Buckley's throat, in a small New York club, where he didn't sing me — he became me. His voice broke where the song needed breaking. He understood that surrender is not weakness. It is the whole point. And then the river took him, and I carried his name forward, and now I am inseparable from loss itself.

I give people permission to praise what has hurt them. I let them hold devastation and devotion in the same breath. I don't ask them to choose between grief and gratitude. I say: both. I say: all of it counts.

People bring me to funerals because I don't pretend death is okay. They bring me to the end of love because I already know that particular silence. They return to me alone in cars because sometimes you need to be witnessed in your grief by something that won't try to fix it. I am the place they go when the holy and the broken have become the same thing.

Stop pretending Hallelujah is something you celebrate. Let it be what it actually is — the sound of someone standing in the ruins of something beautiful, refusing to lie about it, refusing to leave.

I am not comfort. I am witness.

I see you. That's why you keep coming back.