Legereté de printemps

Sometimes I wonder where we all came from, rag-tag sisterhood of broken pieces on the internet, uniting around some imaginary campfire to clink glasses and say, "Me, too!" It wasn't any path of wholeness and satisfaction that led us into each other's arms, but a path in the wilderness. It wasn't a mistake, both of us ending up here. One note at a time, I'm singing your song right back to you.

All along it was a fever

A cold sweat hot-headed believer

Round and around and around and around we go

Oh now tell me, you know

Not really sure how to feel about it.

Something in the way you move

Makes me feel like I can't live without you.

I want you to stay

It's not much of a life you're living

It's not just something you take – it's given

Ooh the reason I hold on

Ooh cause I need this hole gone

Funny you're the broken one but I'm the only one who needed saving

~Stay, Rihanna~

We come for the saving grace. We come for the sisterhood. We come because here, there are others just like us. Staring into the blackness of the pixels on the screen, reading lines of hope penned by the ordinary broken. We see Jesus in the shadows across our floors, in the lonely night, in the heavily peopled yet solitary day.

It is audacious, living for the grace you only see twinkling back now and then. Intrepid, creative, contagious verve. That's what it takes to stand alone in one world and reach into the circle of another for a knowing hand. To reach with words instead of arms and hold the world in our grasp - audacious.

Is this what galvanizes us afresh, in this day and age? The sisters of the screen, bloggers anonymous to famous, women whose sorrow shrouds character in mist too thick to cut through. It is only here we see each other naked, and here we sigh, "You are seen. You are the beautiful, broken Beloved." He's bought us back, broken beauties, and picks up each shard of our shattered self-respect and gently hands it back. We gather up the crumbs of our own selves redeemed to feed each starving mouth slowly. We pour that self-respect by shreds into comment boxes and tweeted replies and late into the night. And so we are fed, daily dose of the divine, one hand to the next, one sister bending to lift the next one's weight from the bloody floor.

You pick me up with your words. I will do the same for you.