He Briefly Thought Of Home

I was given permission to share this precious writing by an excellent young author.

 

 

He Briefly Thought Of Home

By Rylie Demers

 

He was born beneath a sky that seemed to tremble.
 The stars glimmered like distant lanterns, as if heaven itself leaned down to see.
 His mother held him close, whispering old prayers into the night air. Her hands shook, not from cold, but from the weight of the small miracle she cradled.
 The world was quiet except for the sound of breathing; Hers, his, and the wind slipping softly through the cracks of the stable.

He grew slowly, the way light spreads across the morning.
 He was gentle, the kind of child who spoke to animals and believed the wind could hear him.
 He liked the smell of bread baking, the warmth of sunlight on the floor, the sound of his mother humming while she worked.
 When storms came, he ran outside to meet them, laughing, his hair plastered to his face.
 When he returned drenched and smiling, she would scold him softly, drying him with her shawl.
 “You feel too much,” she would say. “Even the rain finds a home in you.”
 He would only smile, eyes wide, as if feeling were the greatest gift of all.

He followed his father into the workshop, where the air was thick with the scent of sawdust and cedar.
 There he learned patience.
 He learned to smooth roughness, to fit the crooked back into place, to make broken things whole again.
 His father’s laughter filled the room, deep and kind.
 When he taught the boy how to plane wood, he said, “Creation listens to the heart that shapes it.”
 The boy listened. Always.

When his father died, silence moved into the house like a shadow.
 The tools hung untouched.
 The wood waited.
 But one morning, his mother found him there, shaping a block of cedar as the dawn spilled through the window.
 Her tears fell quietly.
 “You have his hands,” she whispered. “And his love.”

Years blurred.
 He became a man with shoulders like his father’s and eyes like his mother’s; Gentle, searching, always carrying something sacred and unseen.
 He built tables where families shared bread.
 He repaired broken doors, carved cradles for new life, built chairs for the weary.
 His work carried warmth.
 Each piece held a trace of him, something soft, like love that had soaked into the grain.

He never turned anyone away.
 A widow who could not pay, a child whose toy had broken, he gave, and gave, and gave again.
 When asked why, he only said,

 “Because the world is heavy enough. Let what I make lighten it.”

In his late years, the world began to stir around him.
 He left his home and took to the road, walking with the kind of certainty that comes from sorrow and hope mixed together.
 He found others, men who were lost to the world.
 Fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot, a skeptic.
 He called them friends. They were human, but so was he.

He tired. He hungered. He laughed until tears filled his eyes.
 He missed home.
 He loved them not for who they were, but for what they could be. He saw them as God saw them. He saw what they were supposed to be, before the fall of humanity.

They argued and misunderstood him.
 They wanted miracles while he wanted their hearts.
 They failed him again and again, and he forgave them before they even realized their faults.
 When they fell asleep during prayers, he smiled.
 When they panicked in storms, he reached out his hand and steadied them.

They did not know what he truly was.
 They only knew that when he was near, they felt lighter, as if something inside them remembered how to breathe.

Sometimes, when they slept, he sat awake, looking at the stars.
 He thought of his mother.
 He thought of his father’s laughter in the workshop.
 He thought of home, the smell of cedar and oil, the sound of his mother’s voice saying his name as though it were a prayer.
 He missed it more than he could ever say.

Then came the night the world turned.
 He prayed beneath the trees until his tears burned, and his heart broke under the weight of what he knew must come.
 His friends slept nearby, too tired to keep watch.
 He loved them still.
 Even when one betrayed him with a kiss, he called him “friend.”

The dawn that followed felt hollow.
 They dragged him through the streets while the sky grew heavy and gray.
 He said nothing.
 He had always been gentle with words.

And then, they brought it to him.

The cross.

Two rough beams of wood, freshly cut, raw, splintered, smelling of earth and sap.
 He looked at it and felt his chest tighten.
 The scent rose up around him, and suddenly, the noise faded.
 He was back in the workshop.
 His father was beside him, smiling softly.
 His mother was calling him in for supper.
 The air smelled the same, wood, dust, and warmth.
 He thought of laughter, of bread, of the clumsy arguments of his friends.
 He thought of every table he had built, every cradle, every door.
 Every life he had touched.

He reached out and touched the beam.
 The grain bit his skin.
 The smell filled his lungs.
 Home.
 He looked at it not as a prisoner, but as a carpenter. His eyes, even through the haze of pain, traced the wood, the knots, the rough edges. The corners were jagged, the joinery careless. It was built in haste, without tenderness, without respect for the living tree it once was.

His fingers twitched with the old instinct, to sand it smoother, to balance the weight, to bring out the beauty hidden in the wood. But this was not a creation meant for beauty. This was a weapon made of what he once loved.

The beam’s surface was cruel beneath his touch, biting at his skin like thorns. He knew the type of wood by scent alone.
 He had worked with it countless times before.
 Once, he had used it to craft cradles and tables, things that held life.
 Now it would hold death.

He thought, This is not good work.
 And the thought broke him more than the pain did.

Because he could see what it could have been, the symmetry, the balance, the grace in the design, and for a moment, he almost wanted to fix it.
 Old habits die slow.
 Love for creation does not vanish, even when creation turns against you.

 

They lifted it onto his shoulders, and he fell beneath its weight.
 But he rose again.
 He always rose.

Through the blur of pain, he saw her, his mother, standing in the crowd.
 Her eyes wide, her lips trembling, her hands pressed to her chest.
 For a moment, he was her little boy again, running home in the rain.
 And she was still calling him back inside.

He took another step.
 And another.
 Each fall drove splinters deeper.
 Each rise brought back the scent of the wood, the same scent that had once meant creation, not destruction.

When they fastened him to it, he breathed in that scent again.
 Wood. Earth. Home.
 He thought of his father’s hands guiding his own.
 He thought of his mother’s shawl drying his hair.
 He thought of his friends laughing beside a fire, too human to be holy and too beloved to be lost.

And even as the world darkened, even as breath left him slowly, he still felt love, for all of them, for everything.
 Because love, once made flesh, does not die.
 It lingers in the grain, in the breath, in the air.

He breathed in the scent one last time.
 He thought of home.
 He thought of mercy.
 He thought of the way wood smells before it becomes something new.

And as the sky split open and silence filled the world,
 he whispered forgiveness, not as a command, but as a promise.

Because even a cross, to a carpenter,
 still smells like wood.

And for one last, trembling heartbeat,

 he thought of home.