Once, I was in Ohio, in the middle of a summer where it rained so violently and consistently that I spent what felt like hours at a time in the driver’s seat of my parked car watching the water gather and then cascade down my windshield outside of the grocery store or the post office or the bar where my friends sat inside laughing, waiting for me. And I could convince myself, briefly, that the world outside was flooding and I would be carried away to anywhere else. And I’ve read enough of The Book to know that floods and sickness are both acts of God.

In that same Once, I lived in Columbus, Ohio and liked a woman from miles away, a woman who was almost an entire country away from where her father became sick, and laughed at her jokes on twitter and read and re-read her poems and we sent each other copies of small books we wrote and then the only plane she could take that would get her back to her sick father in time had a long layover in Columbus, Ohio. And nothing else makes sense but for that to be an act of God.

And in that same Once, I sat in my car on a day it didn’t rain. And I held a bag on my lap. And inside the bag was a nervously written letter, and some candy, and a few books. And on the bag I scrawled the name of a woman who was flying back home to care for her sick father and I sat outside of the airport because in a message, she’d told me that she was flying in, that she had hours to be stuck in an airport terminal, and she’d first asked if there was anything fun to do, and then asked if I could maybe stop by and say hello, and I am saying now that I know a sick father and a worried daughter is not a landscape upon which to prop up a monument to romantics and I think now that when I say act of God I am really saying who will suffer so that I might be able to wrap my hands around the neck of some fleeting blessing.

Despite what I knew in that moment, what I know and have known forever is that the people you dream of standing across from don’t just drift to you on accident, and they may never drift to you again, and so I grabbed the bag and left my car and went to stand at the exit to the Southwest Terminal in the Columbus Airport, and I will call that an act of faith.

Today, months beyond the summer where it felt like Columbus, Ohio might flood and be carried away, the father is healthy again. And on a couch in her city which is far from my city, the woman who flew home to him laughs at a joke on television. When she laughs, she covers her face with both of her hands, so that all that can be seen are her eyes, small slivers of themselves. Her body trembles from the shoulders down. She is the kind of person who laughs as if she knows joy has an expiration date. You can see it vibrate through her entire body before exiting. She drops her palms from her face, and smiles, satisfied. I suppose the mundane things a person does that we imagine as art are subjective, usually tied to how in love we are with the person carrying out the action. I do not know what it is called when watching a person laugh for a brief moment is the thing you want to capture in a bottle. I think you realize that you love a person when they do something they would consider forgettable, but you see it every time you close your eyes. I don’t know what this is an act of, but it is an act of something I don’t imagine myself deserving.