The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Me, my brothers, and my sister are victims of that God-awful trend Pentecostal parents all seemed to fall into the trap of in the nineties. You know—the naming their children after Christian-adjacent words? I never tell anyone my full name because my middle name feels like a smear on my forehead that tells the world where I’m from, and I don’t want to think about where I’m from, but here it is: Georgia True Carter. Oh my God, I know. True. It’s painful.

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

it wouldn’t be beyond her to have seen me write something anti-Trump on social media and feel like it was a personal attack, which is a thing that’s uniquely American, in case you didn’t know. The way people there conflate their political alignment with their personal identity. Being a Republican or being a Democrat in America is for so many people akin to racial identity.

We do all these things to avoid the ephemeralness of ourselves and the people we form attachment bonds with around us, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it…

Death is confronting for sheltered people because it fractures realities.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath. It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

I talk to her about those kinds of things in the slow, boring, drawn-out way that allows her and all other people to feel like they’re a mystery, because feeling like you’re mysterious seems to be something humans value, maybe because people don’t like to feel exposed, but I don’t have it in me to appease her in this way today.

It was the first place he was ever fully himself. It was the first place he was ever afforded the space to feel the weight of the life he left behind in Okatie and breathe in all the ways our family failed us.

But there’s always that niggle, sometimes conscious but most often not—that the people who made you, the ones who created you, your own flesh and blood, the ones who are genetically wired to want you—they didn’t want me.

With all due respect and first impressions only, this author can run-on sentence like nobody's business. And I'm professionally trained to be suspcious of an em-dash now.

do try to switch it off, try look at everything like a person who hasn’t taught herself to see the world stripped back to its sinew and bones, but sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard not to keep seeing things that are there in plain sight once you’ve taught yourself to see them.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

a place where you found you were human—“is

But turning up is a two-way street.

Her sister is a sommelier, so Hats doesn’t fuck around with wine, but my sister’s a narcissist so I absolutely do.

Young and wise. It’s paradoxical.

I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.

It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful. That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.

Sam feels like I’ve read him before, but I haven’t.

He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.

It’s been about thirty seconds since I met him, and I’m enamored with him.

Yep. We are all thinking this too.

Icons for a generation thirsty to be both defined as individuals but wholly and utterly accepted and palatable to their peers.

All we have is this. The bones of a close relationship and the smoky memory of how we used to be and might not ever be again.

understand that acknowledging the fullness of something then requires you to feel the consequences of it with a fullness too, and I don’t think he has the bandwidth.

Maybe it hasn’t sunk in that my dad dying is the closing of a chapter in my life I’d honestly barely read yet. But there are too many people filling the rooms, filling up the space my mind would need if I wanted to feel the breadth of death in the way it demands to be felt.

“Our relationships never really evolved past the ages we left each other behind.”

Duchenne—his

Take a drink everytime Hastings uses Duchenne and we'd be needing Sam Penny as our own sponsor .

“Here’s what I think.” And I sit up to tell him. “People read the Bible wrong. It’s a diary of normal people, like us, from thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the God they’d heard of from their ancestors. They didn’t write it for us to read it now. And I think people read it without the true social or historical context, and they bring their own instead.”

“That God that my mom thinks she serves—he’s so much smaller than who I think the real one is. The real one—to me, he’s everywhere, in everything. And sure, maybe he speaks through the Bible. But also maybe he speaks through Narnia, and Harry Potter despite J. K. Rowling lately, and the trees, and science, and the stars, and black holes and the ocean and the way the sky looks sometimes, and you can feel it in your chest.”

“And I think he loves everyone, and he wants everyone to be okay, and I think almost everyone who is, like, earnestly seeking God—people aren’t seeking that out of ego; they’re looking for the meaning of life and they’re looking beyond themselves for it—and, I mean, I don’t know anything, except that I think God is the kind of guy who when someone dies, he’ll sit there and sift through every heartfelt thought, every drunken prayer, every desperate plea for help, every Mumford & Sons song that you’ve sung to look for a hint of a confession that you believe in him.” Sam purses his mouth and nods once. “Your God sounds pretty cool, I guess.”

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time. The way love was delivered to Oliver, full of conditions and hoops to jump through and lies to abide by, being loved and being hurt were two sides of the same coin. How that translated in the way he loved me was this: He would never force me to tell him something; he’d never push me; he’d never challenge me in a serious way; he would never do anything to ostracize me or make me uncomfortable. He loved me a dysfunctional amount, and love and dysfunction are a peculiar pairing that flavor everything with a specific brand of contradiction. See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.

don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.

think the only thing that qualifies you to talk about the gospel is admitting you need it.

The concept of the gospel is counterintuitive and much easier to digest if you adhere to a strict regimen of shallow perfectionism, like Debbie does, or my mom. It’s in this hollow I think most of the church resides, but I think the place God would like us to be is in the gutters or the libraries asking questions about why a good God would make a world so fucked up.

I’ve always thought like this, all my life. My Sunday school teacher used to sit with me in a corner and answer question after question that she couldn’t have possibly known the answers to, but she tried because I think she saw the value in asking.

Importabt re: asking questions.

I understand now that I’m older that it takes a true and deep faith in God to feel comfortable enough to ask and be asked such questions, but I don’t think many people like the depths.

The deeper you go, the darker it gets, but I once knew a guy who said there are shadows to his wisdom.

The more you know the less you know. The essence of faith and anti-thetical of fundamentalism.

Becks

Why are you giving a man you rightly hate a nickname?

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing. He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

gestural emblem.

Drink.

but the light casts his shadow on me and I know he’s there and I’m not by myself, which is a very powerful thing to feel when you’ve felt by yourself most of your life.

AU1

Drink again.

Words like sociopath, psychopath, narcissist—they’re thrown around in people’s everyday vernacular, and way too casually at that. But

It’s impression management, what they’re doing. Neither of them can handle being disliked—Maryanne because of her disorder, Mom because of her dysfunction.

Wondering and questioning why things are the way they are, not accepting the present and permanent—they’re all really solid ways to slow down progress.

“You want to get over someone quickly?” I stare over at him. “Feel everything. Every shred of loss, everything you’re missing now that they’re gone. On lonely nights, be lonely. When you’re sad, look it in the eye.

Sam Penny doing any of those things would be poetry, but him like that on the bed with a book is Shakespeare.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?” “Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.

“Jesus came down from heaven to save us from eternal damnation, but God just stayed up there. He was like…pretty hands-off in the saving of the world.”

I take a photo in my mind, let history rewrite itself for a second. It doesn’t erase it, but it scribbles over it a bit in a louder color.

A romantic endgame is something I’ve spent much of my adult(ish) life considering. It sounds ominous, and I guess it is in some ways, but so is love if you’re doing it properly. Ominous and hopeful in one fell swoop.