There was a time when she believed in absolutes – nuances and subtleties were exaggerations of the fickle and feeble-hearted – the ones who never grew out of their Peter Pan phases. Everything about surgery just made sense: the cold steel of the scalpel, the steady hum of the monitors, the precision and placement of each cut and stitch. She had grown up with the laws of nature for a Bible, and modern medicine as her God, and nowhere in between was there room enough for emotions or feelings to mar her topological construction of the world.
Her faith had been tested, as all faiths eventually are, and a false prophet had briefly led her astray. He found her weaknesses and charmed her with surgeries and intellectual challenges, with academic fame, well-decorated apartments, and even a little jazz. And so she began to doubt the tenets of her pagan religion, and started walking down the path of illusory promises. But when the day of revelation finally came she found herself alone … surrounded by only the shattered remnants of what might have been, and the shards of a faith once held so dearly.
So she slowly rebuilt her pillars, one broken shard at a time. She stitched and taped, cemented and molded, and waited and watched for absolution to mend the parts her hands couldn't fix. And so the world began to make sense again, and a day came when she could almost believe that she was whole.
But then he arrived, the vestige of someone who had once been unbroken as well. He came in limping, torn and bruised; the shadows of what-once-was still clung to his sunken in cheeks. And though his body bore the scars of a war fought halfway around the world, his eyes still radiated the struggle that neither time nor distance could help dissipate. Yet in them she occasionally saw flickers of the man he had been; they spoke of someone who had also trusted in the steadiness of a blade, and the precision of a surgeon's hand. She even recognized the same sutured and reconstructed tenets of an infallible faith that she herself had built her own shrine around.
The two argued and agreed, cajoled and comforted, and tripped between their adjoining palaces, clinging to the familiar halls, choosing to remain blind to the broken panes tenuously balanced by willpower alone. Her movements eventually slowed, and stillness settled over his limbs, and, because all flawed foundations give way – the walls came tumbling down.
Some religions are more fragile than others – so much so that even the way they shatter can be beautiful. They were both left in a harsher world, with no shelter to combat the oncoming forces, the ruins of before scattered about their feet. But this time was different. The broken pieces glittered around them so that what once was dark was illumined, and that which was light now revealed a path toward each other. This was no longer the world of cause and effect, nor was it one where answers could be found on the pages of a checklist. It was, however, a place where she could find her heart, and he … he could find grace.