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.

It’s a natural fear, I get it. All humans, whether they know it or not, are profoundly impacted by their imminent deaths. Mortality is unbearably confronting, so much so that lots of people spend their whole lives trying to live as though it doesn’t chain them like it does the rest of us.

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.

You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.

I liked the buzzy electricity around us, the surge of adrenaline I’d get every time we’d start to argue, but after about a month, before I’d see him, I’d feel tired.

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 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.

“There’s no such thing as an addictive personality; it’s a psychological myth and a nice way of saying you struggle with neuroticism and that you have poor impulse control.”

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.

The concept of the gospel is counterintuitive and much easier to digest if you adhere to a strict regimen of shallow perfectionism,

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.

You survive whatever you need to, however you can.

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.

“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. 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.”

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

Then he rolls on top of me, looking down. “Good girl.” I nearly die on the spot.

A man is only as good as his word. I said what I said. I meant it.