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Back when Pastor Christine screamed her joys at you in that huge Evangelist church, surrounded by swaying women stretching their hands to the sky and screaming praise Jesus, you thought it must be the strangest, unlikeliest thing in the world. You don’t know why you were there or why you’re thinking about it now, but she stands there vividly, eyes to the painted ceiling. She tilts her head up and exposes her long skinny neck. Her dreadlocks fly back. “God is my beacon,” she says, she screams, like she’s being burned alive. “He shows me the way home.”
There’s a reason you never went to church. Too long? Too boring? You must have thought so as a child, because you stopped going when your parents did. Their excuse was that they had no time, and yours was that you just followed them. Your best friend’s church was the closest your ten-year-old self ever got to being saved. “We are immortal; we will live past our bodies,” said the service, but then came the playing and the running around with good people, the laughing and screaming. That was your church, and religion was nothing to you but something you didn’t understand.
You know so much about your best friend, but it flits like it’s about to be forgotten, sucked away by the weird dynamic-standstill of the things around you. The things you did when you were sure you two would be together forever, sleepovers and twin birthdays, at that age when it wasn’t weird for a girl to stay over at a boy’s house. That was before the move, before college, before life. You have a card from him and it’s made a home on your bookshelf, right next to A Child’s Garden of Verses; it’s a lovingly scrawled picture of a dragon adorned with gold antlers and a smile. It says something sweet in kid-scribbles, words engulfed in flames from its mouth.
In college, religion comes back, and it reminds you of him. Only now you know what religion is, and you know how it’s evil and how it’s great and all the things you can’t seem to sort out in your head. You’ve taken philosophy, and now you can wonder now if there is really a you that isn’t the you that walks and talks. Can you live without your body? With God or without, you just want to know. What is a soul, what is a body? When you break your arm, does your soul change? Does it change when you hear a friend’s story and laugh, or lose your grandfather and cry? Does it change when your boyfriend runs up behind you and tickles your sides, and you scream and scream until your lungs burn?
Those questions are less important when the drinking and the partying ends and the eight-to-seven schedule starts. They don’t like latecomers at Wells Fargo. You still don’t fully know what a “dynamic lending officer” is, but it’s not a go-fer, and that’s starting out high up. You get up at seven, drink yourself out of house and coffee, tell your go-fers to go for some more coffee because the office kind is free. Still you wonder, and wonder if the thought will ever leave you, what else is there? What are you and what is just pretending to be you?
The answer seems clear one second and lost the next. This is you. This fusion of all yous former and current, your past and your present, there and gone in an instant. But it’s not complete, and you wonder why. Why aren’t you growing? Where is your wedding, your Nobel Prize? Where are your children, carbon copies of you, running through your green-washed suburban yard? Where is you, old and grey and happy, looking like a watercolor swatch on a hazy blue canvas, napping in a rocking-chair in the sun with tea and a husband?
The vacuum rushes away around you and everything comes back with a stagnant impact. It’s hot, so hot. Your skin is burning. The standstill shatters, a thunderhead rolling off. Your insides are sucked into space. Screams fill the air, so thick you want to cough. If you breathe, you might inhale them, so you don’t.
You feel the tumbling chaos but the only thing you know is terror. There’s darkness and black smoke and pulsating heat. You gather the little scraps of consciousness, the ones that aren’t focused on the pain or the fear or the emptiness, and hope with all your strength that Pastor Christine was right. Let there be something beyond this spinning hell and these bright flickering lights. Let there be something beyond this weight-of-the-world, bearing down on you and making you sure that there is absolutely nowhere in this life left for you to go.