More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
Because—honestly—neither party is great these days, and when you personalize something to the extent many people do in politics, any time anyone questions something the party does, it can feel like they’re questioning you, and that’s just plain unhealthy.
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.
I talk to her about those kinds of things in the slow, boring, drawn-out way that allows her and all other people to feel like they’re a mystery, because feeling like you’re mysterious seems to be something humans value, maybe because people don’t like to feel exposed,
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. Like, I knew what I was getting into before we got into it. And we’d get into it, fall into it like a dance.
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.
“Well, you can know someone’s lying and still not know the truth…
“I study.” I lift my shoulders breezily. “Both literally and professionally. I’m training under the director of the Emotional Intelligence Academy Group and I’m three-quarters of the way through a double master’s.” He straightens up. I’ve impressed him. “In what?” “Behavioral science and clinical psychology.”
I scratch my wrist, make it look absent-minded—except it isn’t—it’s called a manipulator. And I’m not being manipulative to him doing this; I’m humanizing myself. I’m doing an action that would imply to him I feel nervous, and I want him to think I’m nervous because he’ll find it a bit disarming, and I want him to stay attracted to me and sometimes men are weird about power dynamics like that.
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. ***
It was crazy, actually. Behind them and beside them. It was this almost otherworldly feeling, where you’re so small, but not in a way that’s degrading or upsetting, but the fact that you’re on the planet at the same time as something so big and so significant, I don’t know—it was strangely life-affirming? Like you’re not alone in the world. And I get that same feeling when I’m near Sam Penny.
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. 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
...more
“Georgia.” He peers down at me. “What is the psychological reason behind why I want you to have my sweater? And why am I so annoyed that you won’t take it?”
I think I like him a lot. I also think I should definitely not like him a lot. It’s been about thirty seconds since I met him, and I’m enamored with him.
Sometimes it’s easier to play the characters we’ve been assigned.
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.
He gives me a long look again and then shakes his head. “That’s not why you’re sad.” I bellow, “Who the fuck asked you!” He shrugs gently. “I don’t know, Georgia—I think maybe the more important question is, who didn’t ask you?”
I’m not religious how my parents are but I thought it was sort of sweet. Him out there alone with his Bible.
“Listen, Gige—” He swats his hand dismissively. “Sam is like, this reformed bad boy turned easy, breezy yoga queen, who loves transparency and balance and wholeness, and you like pushing people’s buttons to make their heads pop off so you can see how their brains work.”
“My point is, if you don’t like gay people, just say that.” I flash her a non-Duchenne smile. “Don’t weaponize the Bible for your own gay agenda.”
“Um—” She cringes. “I mean—we go to the same church.” She pauses. “I don’t think we know the same God.”
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.
“Georgia, I want you to know,” he starts, swallowing heavily. “You are—easily!—the most complicated person I’ve ever met.” My face lights up, completely elated. “Thank you.”
She glances down at herself. “Oh—that’s embarrassing.” She shrugs. “Had sex as I was leaving the house. Nothing puts the fear of God in you like—” “Sex?” I interject. “No!” she scolds me. “Death! And sex is the antithesis of death.” She leans down close. “Y’all should have it. It’s so good when you’re hyperaware of the impermanent nature of everything.”
“tonic immobility,”
“I think in the Bible, the point is that Jesus paid the bill.”
“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
...more
Debbie goes to church on Sunday. Debbie reads the Bible. She goes to Bible study and prayer group and the women’s meeting, and she thinks these things qualify her to tell people—perfect strangers, like Sam—about the gospel, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the only thing that qualifies you to talk about the gospel is admitting you need it.
It’s in this hollow I think most of the church resides, but I think the place God would like us to be is in the gutters or the libraries asking questions about why a good God would make a world so fucked up.
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.
“I did come to you!” I smack tears away. “The second he touched me, I ran to your bedroom.” I shake my head at the memory. “And it was empty. Window open. Curtains closed. ‘Heartbeats’ blasting. You were with that exchange student from Prague, and I knew that it would have killed you if you knew I came to you and you weren’t there for me, so I let it kill me instead.”
He tilts his head, and his face looks pained. But I wonder if it’s pained for me. “Are you okay?” I touch his face without even thinking—his lip’s all cut. His face is a bit bloody still. “Are you?” Sam sighs and gives me a look, holding my hand to his face with his own. He shifts his head and kisses my palm. “Yeah.”
“Fuck.” He sighs as his head falls back. “Would it be so fucked up if I kissed you right now?” I drop my chin a little and gnaw on my bottom lip. “No,”
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.
“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 it wasn’t until she compared it to being tickled that I realized—like how you can hate being tickled and still laugh when you are—the laughing isn’t a sign of enjoyment; it’s a physiological response to something happening to your body. Orgasms are the same, so it turns out.”
the more I realize something about it hurts me, but not in the bad way—in the good way? 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.
“No, but I mean, like-like—” “Like-like?” He scoffs. “What are you, eight?” I fold my arms over my chest. “Answer the question.” He nods his chin at me. “Ask it better.” I square my shoulders and look him straight in the eye. “Sam Penny, do you have romantic feelings for 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.”
“You’re going to have to make the first move,” I tell him quietly, but Sam shakes his head. “Please?” I press. He nudges my cheek with his nose, then kisses my cheek. “You can do this.” He pulls back a little so our eyes meet. “You’re in control.”
This is it. This is what music exists for. This is why the birds sing. This is 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.
I take a photo in my mind, let history rewrite itself for a second. It doesn’t erase it, but it scribbles over it a bit in a louder color.
