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.

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.

Maryanne was wailing somewhere in the background. I heard things in my room smashing. I knew even then, whatever was breaking was exclusively the things I cared about most at the hands of my sister who cared about me the least.

“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,

Our relational pattern, until now, would have him believe that he can say or do anything he wants to me and we’ll just…rubber-band back to being who we were before it happened. He is right—kind of. But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work like that.

He nods toward the TV. Outlander, season one. I mean—who can blame him? Jamie Fraser, hello.

🤣🤣🤣

My head tucks neatly under his chin like maybe we’re Russian nesting dolls from the same set.

With everyone else, I like their silence because it talks to me. I trust people’s silences more than their words. I can read the world in silence. But Sam is different. Silence with him is silence. 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.

Sam sees the world through this peculiar and raw lens of knowing there’s bad out there. He knows it, can see it, recognizes it—he might even acknowledge it, but it doesn’t seem to affect him. He just breathes deep and constant until the good he knows is coming comes.

I don’t though; I just need a minute. I go into the stall, shut the door, and lean back against it. I let myself feel for a minute the grotesque weight of it all. The years of lies that have pressed down on our whole family, squashing and contorting our lives and selves. Who might we all have been if truth was allowed to live under our roof?

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?