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.

But why would I be going into shock at the loss of a parent I lost so many years ago already?

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.

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.

my social inhibitions melt away quickly around gay people because I trust them more than straight ones.

“You know, you could have told me…” “What?” Sam scoffs, taking a step closer to me. “And ruin all that fun you were having objectifying me?”

“I’m weathered.” He sounds tired. “Just not in ways you can see with your eyes.”

“I don’t have a drinking problem.” I frown. Oliver’s eyebrows get tall, and he crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, Georgia, that’s your fault, not mine.”

“Didn’t Mom say Valentine’s Day was a fine day for the devil to stretch his legs?” “Yeah,” Oliver concedes. “But I think that’s because I was trying to send a love letter to Josh Hartnett.”

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.

I am breezy. Well, I’m not really breezy, but I want him to think I’m breezy.

He looks a little pained. “You fucked over your sister and you’re not sorry?”

SHE DIDN’T, YOU IDIOT 😭💔

“You know, this is my store,” Beckett says, watching me, and my stomach churns.

MARYANNE YOU BITCH

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.

“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.”

“Slander is also a sin.” “So is premarital sex,” she bites back, pointedly. Clearly a friend of Maryanne. “So I’ve heard.” I nod, pretending to be rueful. “It’s very fun though. Have you had it?”

Think about how being a “Christian” has so little to do with acting Christ-like now, especially these days, and especially in America.

“It’s pink!” Tenny blinks. “Fuck you!” Oliver spits. “It’s a dusty quartz—”

I push back from the table. “PTSD.”

I was only just fourteen the first time it happened.

💔💔💔

She just closed the door.

Stupid cnt

Then we began to study cognitive function in university and the minute my professor mentioned “tonic immobility,” I knew it…knew it in my bones.

he throws his arm around me and leads me away. Unfortunately, by “away” I mean just back to the car, not to France or like, a cabin in woods where we have crazy around-the-clock sex, but it is away from my mother, which is something enough, I suppose.

“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.”

“Yeah, fine, Ol.” I shrug, annoyed and tired. “So who’s here for me?” Oliver gives me the meanest look he’s maybe ever given me. “Beckett?”

Uhm ok fuck off

We were equally as infatuated with both boys in Pearl Harbor.

hated my dad for all the ways he wasn’t there for me and Oliver, but I still wanted him to want to be my dad.

Those stay frozen in time in their dust bags in the back of my closet. Kind of the same place where my dad lives inside my heart.

“What happened happened ten years ago—a decade ago! I was a kid! And none of you, no one”—I meet her eyes now and let her see how much it’s hurt me—“not even you, has ever let me forget about it.”

😭😭😭

Therapy? Trying to feel wanted by anyone who’d have me? Overachieving? Avoiding? Self-acceptance?

Or if he shared a drink with Oli, he’d get like, dick juice in his mouth, I don’t know.

I lean over the pool table and take my shot, and as I do, Beckett’s hand grazes my ass. “Play nice,” he says quietly, and I freeze.

Oh fuck no…

“You know what?” I give her a curt smile. “If I’m a whore, then you’re my pimp.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Because she prostituted her fourteen-year-old sister for popularity.”

My oldest brother bucks in the arm of the security man. “He raped my sister!” he yells, thrashing.

🥺😭

Like, I’m such a fucking idiot for thinking being saved by someone would undo being raped by someone.

💔

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.

And it aches in my shoulders and my ribs because I know it won’t be filled tonight, and when he stops kissing me, which he eventually will because he has to because that’s how kisses work, it will tear me in two, because I think I’ve been waiting to know Sam Penny all my life.

Sam doesn’t do anything, doesn’t say anything—it’s not his fight, he doesn’t need to—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.

“People don’t develop substance dependencies by dealing with their problems; they develop them to numb them.”

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

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.

“My feelings for you are…strictly romantic.” Then he adds as an afterthought—“And often sexual.”

Tenny stands at the doorway, eyes flicking from me to Sam. He looks at Oliver walking down the hall, then nods toward Sam’s toothbrush. “You might want to put some toothpaste on that, man.”

💀

“You know, I remember when you were like, one, and first learning to walk—it was at Grandma and Grandpa’s—and you took your first steps, and everyone was clapping and cheering, and Maryanne was like, four—and she just came and shoved you over.”

But laughing at things that hurt you, almost no matter how you slice it from a psychological standpoint, is usually positive. It’s often considered a coping mechanism, or in my case, a sign of psychological recovery.