The Cedarville Review 2020

22 | THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW instinctual-habitual-unchangeable-perpetual-continual pattern that teaches geese to fly south and caterpillars to weave a chrysalis and tadpoles to sprout legs. Crescent-shaped sand dunes and rings to tell the age of trees and spirals in pineapples and mollusks and sunflower seed-heads. Tessellations in a boxy honeycomb and connect-the-dot constellations in the sky. Symmetry in starfish and snowflakes and Siberian tigers. Nature is polka dots and stripes and chevron. I’m monochromatic and blank. I’m post- Eden, feeling the heat of Gabriel’s sword of flames. I am apart. I feel like I’ve deviated from my design, and I don’t know how to get back to it. I feel like Eve after she ate the fruit, long hair draped over her shoulders hunched in shame, breath quickening and hands shaking as she realized what she’d done. I feel like Moses walking out of the Red Sea, hearing the walls of water crash back into place behind him, only to be told soon after that he wouldn’t make it out of desert exile, that he’d never see the luscious land flowing with milk and honey. I feel like Daniel, a sojourner in a strange land, refusing idol-sacrificed meat and cheese and wine and wanting more than anything to go home.