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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.
This cuts so deep. Hits so hard.
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.
I hadn’t really planned on doing anything. Like, maybe getting drunk the night of the funeral and having it out with my sister so I don’t have to see her for another six years—something like that—but that was the height of my plans.
I purse my lips in contempt. Think about how being a “Christian” has so little to do with acting Christ-like now, especially these days, and especially in America.
🎤💧
I don’t know if there’s a PR team in heaven, but can you even imagine the crisis management team they’d need these days? What with people like these idiot girls with bright eyes and dull hearts, not a hair out of place but hearts in the wrong one. Girls like them who bat their eyes as they pick and choose from the Bible to create a world they’re comfortable to exist in.
“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 don’t think they’re not letting your mom into heaven because she didn’t believe in the God that modern Christianity claims to represent. I think he’s good.” I shrug. “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
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I have a closet full of bags and belts and scarves and whatever, and I never let her use them. Not because I’m a bad sharer; I let her use whatever else she wants. Just not those. 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.
A surge of anger pulses through me as I panic she’ll fuck it up and make God sound weird or judgmental…make him sound like he’s the pricky God America might have you believe him to be.
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.
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?
“Am I lying?” “Maybe to yourself. Didn’t you hear him? Dad was proud of you.” “And what the fuck does that matter if he could never tell me or show me himself?” I scowl over at him. “That his proudness of me had to be spelled out for me by some random French guy in Louisiana? Like, what does that say about his proudness?”
Oooof.
Could that be true? If that’s true, it would maybe mean not that he didn’t love me at all, just that he loved me in different language to my native tongue, and he never knew how to say it—which, admittedly, is still tragically sad, but is arguably less candidly cruel. Could my father actually have cared about me enough to orchestrate that? Is that even possible?
