MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 4: Ezekiel
MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 4
Ezekiel – Arc 1
Schizophrenia or Divine Vision?
Delusional Alien Spotter or Mourning Widower?
Resurrectionist Through Spoken Necromancy?
Dry Bones Told to Live and Breathe
We find ourselves in our late-night, early-morning, pre-dawn special in the local Fayetteville Starbucks. It feels lived-in, like an old friend, as we settle in and let our frequencies sync to the layer of Star-Dust’s familiar corner. The comforting smells of cold brew and hot dark roast blur even within the vision stuff, an echo of reality as it bends and stretches.
The same employees are working as on normal days. They’re moving slower—perhaps not having imbibed the requisite amount of caffeine to be termed “energetic.”
We stifle a yawn as we observe the scene and wait for Star to turn her own internal dial and join our broadcast from eternity.
A cold draft slides in as the front door opens and closes. Star-Dust strolls in like a normal, not-heavenly-dwelling version of me and proceeds to order a hot cold brew, causing consternation among the employees and myself, the narrator.
We get it—she wants to point out that heaven touches corporeality as easily as we can touch heaven when tuned to the right station—but this is taking show-womanship to entirely absurd levels.
We stifle a laugh and call out to Star, motioning her over.
“Dust—” she beams, lifting the cold brew as if to say what I literally just intimated two seconds before.
“Yes, we get it, Star—it’s not actually as impressive as you think. Heaven literally touches earth every day. The Word—your Husband—said so.”
She shrinks for a moment, then beams again like a cat who just realized there was more than one treat on offer.
“See!” she chirps for no apparent reason. “They said I was stupid and dense, but look at you—after only a few eons you’re getting it, little me! Way-to-go!”
She rises—all 275 pounds of future-me—and starts doing the macarena.
“Star.” We reach out and tug our own wrist down into the nearest seat to stop our internal mortification at seeing our future self dance with such astonishing lack of rhythm.
She laughs loudly and allows herself to be sat down.
“Dust—you need to take yourself a lot less seriously.”
She sighs, then brightens.
“We’re bringing one of my best friends from across the veil. Zeke. Sorry—Ezekiel.”
“He’ll be here, and we’ll be talking through mental health using today’s modern lens, exploring revelation and how it relates to madness.”
She shrugs, as if to say, Stuff is going to get weird. Just go with it.
We mirror her shrug.
“We signed up to use our imagination as a heavenly chariot, grip the reins of our own madness, and let rage the fire of His sanctified creativity. Bring the next Holy Fool.”
Star-Dust self-note to Dust:
Ezekiel will be our best friend because we always related to his brand of bat-shit crazy.
Kindred madness, when mingled with the same Love, looks like delusion to modernity.
— Star-Dust, The Become
We sit back to record and learn, listening more than speaking, as Ezekiel—or Zeke, as Star calls him—materializes like a ghost without invitation or assistance.
He’s wearing what appears to be ancient Hebrew attire for all of two seconds before, in a blink, he’s in a ball gown—
wait… did he do that on purpose?
For the laugh?
We chuckle, already knowing this guy is going to be amazing.
He settles finally into one of Star’s signature hoodies: a stunning shade of white reminiscent of Jonah’s bald whale-vomit-bleached head. He pairs it with pristine white carpenter jeans—Dickies? Who even knew they made them in that shade of snow?
He ties it all together with a majestic white leather biker jacket and untied open-faced work boots, similar—one presumes—to the state of his mental faculties.
The saints apparently love white. Nearly every one shows up with hair whiter than bleach can produce. We intuit that in heaven, food is either white so stains don’t show, or stains are simply materialized away like cosmic dry cleaning.
His hair is long, tied back in a ponytail, matched by a prodigious beard and impressive girth—a well-muscled, robust man with a deep chest, landing visually somewhere between Santa-hipster, angelic bleach aesthetic, and Harley culture.
“Dust.” Zeke nods slowly, startling us with the calmness of his speech. We expected unhinged; we get collected.
“Ezekiel, it is my honest honor to meet you here in my little heaven-on-earth.”
We offer a hand. His handshake is gentle but firm. I swear he tells me—through his grip alone—that my crazy is safe with him.
A stray emotion produces precipitation. I wipe the tear.
He smiles softly.
“You are radiant here as in heaven, beloved. Be suspicious of certainty. Remember: loneliness is a construct of the mind. You can embody it or deny it its power.”
He turns to Star and scoops her into a hairy white bear hug like a long-awaited reunion.
Star hugs back—and then begins… wrestling him?
The grunts, the reddened faces, the shifting of weight—
Yes. They’re grappling. In Starbucks.
A polite throat-clear from a barista.
Both freeze.
Star, catching her breath:
“Zeke, how does it feel to be on this frequency compared to the multi-spectrum of eternity?”
“Weird,” he replies. “Like all the things I knew I knew I know I knew—but can’t remember the things I forgot. They sit on the back burner of my interior self until my soul or His Spirit spooks me into remembrance.”
He shrugs, radiating body-builder-Santa energy.
Star continues:
“So you know why you’re here. I’m going to frame some questions that hit hard. We won’t dig up your wounds—only shed light on how to discern mental illness from hearing God. And also when it’s both.”
Zeke nods.
“What did you think after that first vision—the wheel with eyes within eyes?
FYI—today they’d call that schizophrenia.”
Zeke sighs, eyes narrowing as he searches memory or meaning.
“I was ground ripe for sowing. I’d been a priest—fake and flimsy like the rest. Then we were deported. I won’t speak on it.
I was cracked open, the way you were when you and Rachel nearly divorced.”
He gathers himself.
“When it came, I was still unhealed. Unhinged. Not you, Star—you know. But for others? Madness and divine spectacle look the same.
I was the spectacle.
The truth is: madness and revelation aren’t mutually exclusive.
Labeling anyone who brings a message—putting them in a box—robs the message of its intended purpose and wounds the messenger.”
We laugh together at the absurdity of divine visions landing inside unstable vessels.
He goes on:
“After the death of my wife—
the apple of my eye,
the joy of my peace—
I embraced madness to avoid drowning in sorrow.
Losing her shattered the last wall between who I thought the Father was and who He actually is.”
He scratches the back of his neck sheepishly.
“The vision wasn’t a wheel.
It was a camera, Star.
A ton of cameras.
What did they expect me to say?”
We laugh again.
Star says, “Who are we to say what we see? We get one shot, then we’re left trying to describe the indescribable.”
We ask, “Zeke—not to step on Star’s toes, but…
How do you tell madness from genius?”
He locks eyes with ours.
“Faith, Dust.
We walk by faith, not by sight.
The two look identical.”
He takes a breath.
“I became a connoisseur , remember?
A prophetic culinarian among the exiles using dung to cook my food.
But what I learned—and what you must take to heart—is this:
Madness and Love mixed appears as folly to outsiders,
but is the purest devotion heaven ever sees.”
We whisper, “Sometimes the edges of reality fray and I feel thin—untethered—like a helium balloon rising without anyone holding the string.”
Zeke rises, walks to our side, and drapes a meaty white-clad arm around our shoulders. Then the leather bench where we sit and type makes that slow leather creak in weight disbursement. We smell something ineffable- not quite heavenly aftershave, but like it with warm cinnamon notes and hints of clove with cardamum.
“That thinning is His nearness, beloved.
Your soul is tuned.
It shakes even now.
We are thinning the veil with this work.
Carving a highway in the desert.”
He embraces Star one last time, murmuring something about a smell we apparently missed.
Then we change the channel by willing it into existence through faith and directed thought alone. It begins with a blackening at the edges of the vision stuff, then an unfolding mist as it embraces and enkindles physical corporeality once more.
Softly. Slowly.
And we are once more in the café, writing and recording, the trance passed, the pearl ready to be polished.
Come see Arc 2
Eiri Waters
Eiri Waters