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.

I know how you’re supposed to feel when a parent dies. People often experience a loss of identity, a crisis of self. They question who they are and their place in the world as though their parent themselves anchored them on to the planet.

I’m not always like this, by the way. Well, I am—but I try not to be. I do try to switch it off, try to 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 been that way since forever, them and us. Even before anything happened. Nouns versus Adjectives.

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

“Oh my gosh, Maryanne will fuck you up and eat you for breakfast if she ever hears you refer to her as old.” “She’s twenty-eight. That’s nearly thirty.” I shrug, just to be petulant. “That’s kind of old.” “I’m twenty-eight,” Sam tells me. “Then you’re kind of old…” I bat my eyes playfully, then lean over to him and say quietly, “Please don’t fuck me up and eat me for breakfast.” “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” He grins.

“You’re all named after poets,” Sam tells us. I frown. “Well—” He considers. “Most of you. You—” He looks at me. “I haven’t worked you out yet.”

I don’t like my mom. I never really have, not for a long time, and you’ll get it eventually. It sounds callous to say it now out of context, but context is everything. 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 hard not to feed him, though; he’s learned to live off the crumbs of people, and people leave crumbs everywhere.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs, holding my gaze. “I could need a Georgia.” “Trust me.” I lift my eyebrows. “You don’t. They’re not worth it.” “I’m pretty sure they are,” he says,

I nod, already walking out of the kitchen. “Oh great,” sings Sam merrily as he walks away, just loud enough for my sister to hear. “Maybe we’ll have time for a quick fuck in the car after all.”

loooool

He looks at me, but I mean, really looks at me—like there’s subtext. “When I like something, I just like it,” he says. And it’s me. I’m the subtext.

I myself was jonesing for something a little more Irish, but it seems distasteful in front of an addict, and also it’s only about seven thirty in the morning, and I don’t want the addict to think I’m an alcoholic as well as a whore, so.

Me

I know Maryanne did that on purpose. “That was him, wasn’t it?” Sam leans forward, looking for my eyes. “The guy you—” I snap my head in his direction so fast it silences him. It’s a yes, obviously. I pull into the driveway and storm into the house, my sister sitting serenely at the dining room table with our mom. I slam her coffee down in front of her. “You’re a cunt.”

YES GEORGIA

And I don’t think any of the above makes me inherently good or inherently bad either. The same way I don’t think studying science and believing in it precludes me from believing in God if I want to, but my mom says you can’t serve two masters.

Poor Kerouac and Salinger. They’ve been Kurt Cobain-ed. None of those people would have liked to be what they’ve become, yet they’ve become it anyway. 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.

“Um—” She cringes. “I mean—we go to the same church.” She pauses. “I don’t think we know the same God.”

he is genuinely sad for me, and it’s possible I’ve waited my whole life for someone to give a shit like he seems to, but nothing makes sense because I’m a fuck-up no one wants and he’s an alcoholic and my dad is dead somewhere in a cold room, and something about that makes me feel sick.

“I feel like I’m see-through when I’m with you, and I hate that—I think,” I add as an afterthought. “I never feel see-through and I never feel readable. I never feel like that, but with you I do.”

“What’s it like being an addict?” He drops his head as he laughs, then looks back up at me and the light from the sun makes his eyes look like little stars—or maybe the light’s just coming from inside of him? “I miss it,” he tells me with a solemn nod.

It’s a different sort of startled. Startled in my heart, maybe? Because Sam should be a stranger to me, but he isn’t. Like I’ve dreamt of him all my life and I’ve just woken up and it’s bleeding through, and I know him… I know I don’t know him, but I know him. And I hope he knows me too.

I squint at him because it’s all I can do to keep myself from touching him. If I look at him properly, I’ll have to touch him, I’ll just have to; he’s too beautiful not to.

“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.”

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.”

So Oliver and I might be the Adjectives, but our personal adjective is broken.

She loved my dad. Loves? Loves, I think is the appropriate tense. I don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.

It took me a long time to realize that something doesn’t have to always feel wrong to be wrong. It doesn’t even have to be violent to be wrong. But I was fourteen, and he’d kiss me and I wouldn’t kiss him back, and he’d push me down on a bed and climb on top of me, and he would touch all of me, and I’d be stiff as a board, and he never stopped.

Contempt is funny like that. You can be resentful of something, hateful even—and still be jealous of it.

All I know is I wanted to be wanted and I wasn’t and now he’s dead, so I’ll never be.

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

“I’ll come,” Tennyson says from a few meters away, inviting himself. He throws his arm around Savannah. “Let’s go.”

Tearing up

Like, I’m such a fucking idiot for thinking being saved by someone would undo being raped by someone. It’s not how it works. This realization makes me feel alarmingly stupid for a few seconds, because I knew better—or, I thought I would have. I don’t, evidently—but I should.

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.

I don’t shy away from people because they’ve made mistakes. Mistakes make you human. The worst thing you could ever be to me is a liar.

He never lied to me. He would never; he knew what it meant to me, so I knew even as he was doing this—what he was saying must be true. That I would die if we stayed together. It almost felt worth it. Proper love always does.

“Are you up for a bit of a drive?” “With you?” He blinks a couple of times, then smiles. “Yeah, I’ll take the long road.”

“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.

“Have mine,” he tells me, offering me his mug, but I don’t notice what’s in his hands because I’m distracted (always distracted) by his face. “Your what?” “I meant my coffee, but…” He smiles. “You can have my—fuck—have whatever you want. Have everything.”

“They’re talking about church, not God,” I clarify. “And actually, I said I like Jesus.” Tenny rolls his eyes. “They’re the same thing.” “No.” I shake my head again, resolute. “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.”

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.

“My first-edition copy of The Love Affairs of Lord Byron by Francis Gribble”—Sam

AW

Trying to make someone commit to you who’s afraid of commitment is like trying to tie down a tarpaulin once a hurricane’s already started. I’m not doing that.

“I haven’t felt anything for anyone for nine years.” Sam swallows. “I was clean…of everything I was addicted to. I was clean—and then I met you.”

he’s just the boy I love now, and I’d love to get the opportunity to text him one day to bring home some milk, but I don’t think I’ll get to.

:(

“I can’t tell you properly—or in a way with words that give it the gravitas it deserves—what it’s like to watch someone you love more than anyone else kill themself. And that’s what you were doing. Just…slowly. And I didn’t know how to be there for you in that, when you were drunk or high, and every time I was with you when you were those things, there’d be this tipping point where it became obvious that you resented me for something”—he

We don’t hook up. We’ve never hooked up—it’s not the same with you as it was with them.” I give him a long-suffering look. “Why?” “Because.” He shrugs as he reaches for the pajamas I’ve still got clutched to my body. He takes them from my hands. “I’ve met you, and I’m different now.”

“And I’m going to take you on a proper date—in public—and I’m going to kiss you in the restaurant.” I shake my head at him playfully. “I think that’s illegal.” He swallows before he says very simply, “I think I’ve waited my whole life for this day.”

There are a lot of theories as to why people like to have sex when they’re under immense stress or, say, like, about to die (as per every disaster movie ever). Whether it’s an exertion of control, self-soothing with the oxytocin our system floods us with, good, old-fashioned post-disaster sex, or just the shameful cliche of not wanting to feel alone.

Our conscious actions might be the ship we’re sailing, but our subconscious is the rudder that steers it.