The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Tenny and Maryanne, the Nouns… Me and Oliver, the Adjectives. Even by the pure function of what a noun is as opposed to what an adjective is, she likes nouns more, I know she does… A noun is specific. Adjectives? Their main syntactic role is to modify a noun, and that just isn’t something you do in South Carolina.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poor Kerouac and Salinger. They’ve been Kurt Cobain-ed. None of those people would have liked to be what they’ve become, yet they’ve become it anyway.

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?”

but I understand that acknowledging the fullness of something then requires you to feel the consequences of it with a fullness too,

“They go to your church?” I ask. “Um—” She cringes. “I mean—we go to the same church.” She pauses. “I don’t think we know the same God.”

“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.”

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 prayer, every desperate plea for help, every Mumford & Sons song that you’ve sung to look for a hint of a confession that you believe in him.”

It’s not that I’m all that angry; it’s just that I’m tired of my narrative here, even from the people I love and who love me.

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.

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.

contempt

Either Hasting's is DRASTICALLY overusing the word contempt or I'm underusing it

the older I grow and the better I get at seeing people the way I see them, the more I understand that all truths aren’t just apples hanging off a tree waiting for me to pick them. Some things people have to tell you themselves.

He gives me a long look, then kisses me again. It’s not rushy or urgent. It’s not a bookend kiss, he’s not signing off, he doesn’t say goodbye—he just kisses me, hands in my hair, soft and melty, and then he slips out of my room. His kisses are commas.

I decide to flick that thought away, though, because it would be foolish to think you need to stop learning about the things you love.

Our conscious actions might be the ship we’re sailing, but our subconscious is the rudder that steers it.

“I’m not addicted to you, I’m in love with you,” he says matter-of-factly. “I don’t need you, I want you. And I want you because I know you.”

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?

“Don’t say it, man. You’re angry, I get it—that’s fine for now, but one day you’re not going to be angry, and you won’t be able to take that back.”