I want you to know where you stand with me. I want you to know that you do stand with me, a full adult at full height.

I want to crawl in the sandbox together, looking for chunks of quartz or rocks shaped like Winston Churchill. I want to sit in the back pew and heckle between hymns because the rector has forgotten everything enormous. He seems the sort of man who throws tin foil in the microwave to watch it burn.

I want to call things as they seem and consider your response. I want to throw paper airplanes that say “SAVE ME” at your desk when I am trapped on the phone with people who have never been bewildered.

I want to indulge in a butterscotch friendship where everyone can change, and nobody needs to change. The back of my neck gets sticky when they say Jesus loves us the way we are, but too much to resist his red pen. I want to wash my face without fear of the water bill. I want to believe the Resurrector will refresh our tongues even if they never catch fire.

I want to experiment with revolution even if we return to where we began. I want to believe God is good and gigantic enough to forgive us for mocking rectors and soiling our petticoats with fear. I want to believe God is good and gigantic enough that we will get kinder and braver and humbler. I want to believe that love tells the truth when we get smoke in our eyes.

I want to believe you are gigantic in training, big enough that we can stay little enough to stay safe. I do not expect you to wear berets or parse Bruce Springsteen lyrics like I do. You do not need me to overcome my eating issues or watch crime dramas into the night. I accumulate cat figurines, and you wear excessive leopard. We indulge one other’s excursions about high school French and the melting points of cheeses. We shelter one another. This is what “love one another” meant, then and now.

We are not the same. We grow less same because we grow. I do not want to protect us at the price of fear. I want to love the Speaker more than language. I still reach for tinted spectacles to soften your words in my eyes. They are like the old cardboard 3-D glasses, prone to make monstrous what exists beyond red and blue. The visible spectrum is only a sliver. I do not want to confuse the crescent with the moon.

I want to hold onto us when we dangle like mobiles and disagree about the ceiling. I do not believe in ceiling. I have grown taller since you first sat beside me. You use different words. You scrunch into my pew anyway. We both stand at full height.

Angela Townsend (she/her) is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie lives just outside Philadelphia with two merry cats.