The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

There are lots of things you don’t do if you’re from South Carolina, though. You don’t disobey your parents. You don’t skip church. You don’t be gay.

There’s a certain brand of crazy that’s reserved special for the American South, and people who aren’t from there just won’t get it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my sister thinks what she’s calling me about is important, but it wouldn’t be beyond her to have seen me write something anti-Trump on social media and feel like it was a personal attack, which is a thing that’s uniquely American, in case you didn’t know. The way people there conflate their political alignment with their personal identity. Being a Republican or being a Democrat in America is for so many people akin to racial identity.

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 the...

I know how you’re supposed to feel when a parent dies. People often experience a loss of identity, a crisis of self. They question who they are and their place in the world as though their parent themselves anchored them on to the planet.

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. To be fair, death is confronting for all people, probably. Sudden deaths, anyway. But the idea of death, when we look at it square in the eye, it unsettles us all. 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. It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

I give her another smile again, but this time I think of the Dachshund puppy that the owner of the café down the street just bought, so my smile looks more genuine,

There are parts of life in LA that would feel like you’ve struck oil if you’re an emotionally dysregulated neurodivergent, which he is.

It’s strange how you can long for a place to be your own and hate it so much in one breath.

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.

“Three! She’s had three sexual partners. Now, I know that in the walls of your small-town church, that probably sounds unbearably scandalous, but in the scheme of other things, like life and death—it’s really not a big deal.”

I think I believe in God, but not the one people like Maryanne and my mom claim to know. 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.

You know how there’s an invisible threshold you cross when you like someone where you go from just friends to something else?

“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.”