The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

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.

My sexual choices between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two? Retrospect.

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.

It’s strange how you can long for a place to be your own and hate it so much in one breath.

He hasn’t changed much. It’s funny how people freeze in your mind.

so I try my best not to feed the dragon in my mind that sees everything no one wants it to see. It’s hard not to feed him, though; he’s learned to live off the crumbs of people, and people leave crumbs everywhere.

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.

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time.

You survive whatever you need to, however you can.

I envisioned my redemption story playing out. The music would swell in the soundtrack of my mind and years of pain would fall off me like scales and I would be different because my savior made me feel clean again; but life, it seems, and hearts as well, are not that simple.

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.

Fucking up and owning it is like catnip for me.

“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. Every single memory I had of Storm, I ruminated on them for weeks on end and it felt like I fell into a fire, and then somehow, one day, after months of pain and months of forcing myself to feel all of it, I saw a picture of him and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anymore.”

You know how there’s a good kind of hurting? Like rubbing out a cramp? Or great sex, sometimes? Being near him hurts me all over my body. I think it’s because he’s what all the songs are singing about. Every single fucking one of them, they’re singing about him.

“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.

This is what music exists for. This is why the birds sing. This why the tide pulls and the water falls. It’s why the sun rises and it’s why the moon hangs there all ghosty white.

His kisses are commas.

“To death and for free.”

You get this foreboding sense, somewhere deep inside of you…it’s guttural. Deeper than subconscious, more tangible than the speculative “universe” guiding you—maybe it’s a slip in time, or maybe it’s just pure instinct. And you just know…after this thing…everything’s going to be different.

There’s the version of pain where something hurts you so badly, you don’t even realize the full extent of the injury until later.