“Yo, la peor de todas”
-Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
Sanguinely, in the final renewal of her vows
You and I walked into the tabernacle a half-hour earlier, through a dark door, thinking you must have misread the schedule since the lights were off. One-hundred-twenty high-schoolers were standing in a circle, holding plastic candles, as we leaned in the threshold. Pastor Mary said “If any of you have ever felt lonely and feel like no one could possibly understand how lonely you are, I want you to turn your light on”. The circle lit their candles. You held up our finger in the doorway — this little light of mine. “Repeat after me: you are not alone.” We did. “If any of you struggle with self-harm, or any of your family or friends self-harm, I want you to turn your light on.” Another luminous response. You put our finger up. My friend John noticed us and gave us his candle. I hoped he didn’t notice the finger.
“You are not alone.”
You might be. When the pastor talks about trauma, beneath the rafter that reads God is Love, she repeats the phrase, “hope begins with God with us.” That’s how she processed being abused as a child: with a God who destroyed Job’s life because Job was good to Him; A God who stopped speaking to the descendants of Eve; A God who bought his children a seven-coloured necklace and harnessed the neck of the sky to say I will never genocide again; A God who sent his one and only son (and all the children of God) to share a propaganda to the world that He always loved them. A God who made me us.
Suddenly, the children created lines for communion. You sat and talked with Luke, joked and played with your candle. He had to show you how to turn your candle off. The line suddenly dissolved and he got up. After a beat, you followed and took a sip of what I’d recently called supermarket blood, partook in a ritual, last week, I forgot the name of. The pastor who caught me sleeping in G’s room (we don’t have to talk about her), the last time we saw him, smiled as you drank the new covenant in my blood.
The last time you and I took communion was at this camp with G (ok, we can talk about her) before the celebratory supper at the end of the summer. You walked up to the white tent dressed up, with benches circling around the perimeter. You’d just seen her. You let her shave me. She was wearing an orange dress that stunned you. She looked like fire. You greeted her and sat down, but she didn’t follow. It struck you! You should have given her a compliment, then — not waited. You looked at her across the circle as the pastor sang God songs and read about the last supper, she did not look back. When it was time to take communion she stayed sitting. She wouldn’t look at you. It had made you feel awkward, everyone watching as you walked up: you wanted to compliment her to just her, not in front of everyone.
When the service was over, you speedwalked to try and keep up with her on the way to the cabin. Someone else was with her and she kept her eyes angrily forward. After you were ready you paced about the door to the female counselor’s cabin, you noticed her book outside and knocked on the door to return it and speak to just her. Someone else opened the door and when she said who it was, they all booed you because of your failure. At the coffee machine, a friend confirmed what you thought, that you hadn’t been quick enough to call her beautiful. Once you cornered her on the basketball court to supply the belated compliment, she refused to believe you weren’t saying it because someone else told you to. Then, she told you, our outfit was stupid — no one else was wearing a tie like you, a kaleidoscope pattern matched by your burgundy corduroys. You brought it from home especially for the occasion.
You never left her company when I was angry nor when she was. It was always about misunderstanding in our mind, who were we to be angry in misunderstanding? At dinner she made fun of your tie to the whole table. A few people chuckled, but I think our shame was too apparent, the way you didn’t laugh but looked down beneath the table for something. We feel vain and pathetic remembering how much that hurt us. Sorry that it's hard to follow this story. The whole night, she kept insulting us, covertly with others, rigidly to you.
You moved across the country to be with her, not because she really cared or listened, but because you needed her to. There was no one else. I wanted to die and cut you because who were we to keep living if you couldn’t please the one who loved us — all you could do was anger her. We could not alleviate the feeling of disorder chiseling at our skull and the merciless dissonance that ripped us apart when we were with her, the feeling that didn’t start until we loved her and she let a lie slip for the first time (sorry I’m telling, not showing). Once, after you returned from a family reunion, she walked slowly towards you with a blank face to tell you her favourite week of the summer was when you weren’t there.
Months later, I carved a cross into our thigh with a knife our dad gave you, because, for me, everything has to mean something. You dropped the scab-cross in her sight like a cat drops a bird in their master’s lap — here you go Father, look what I found. She blinked at you and we realized we had nothing else to do but present the new evidence of pain in front of her, plead, and pray for change.
When you’re anxious in the right way, you think you are her, see yourself as her, you think you’re inside of Her — like some perverted fuck. You begin to fidget with something (if you grab the butterfly pillow you bought with her, that makes it worse), angle your head down and look up, recognize (disembodied) the exact pained reaction, see yourself ignoring the nonexistent people trying to help, the nonexistent God prayed to help you, see yourself ignoring me; you have the gnawing feeling that maybe abuse is too strong a word, that she couldn’t be abusive, she’s a victim — until you remember what you cannot forget (not again), that she hit you, unprovoked, and kept hitting after I said “ow”, and you were too scared to let it enter my reality just then, so you still let her fuck us. You came quickly, which she hated. Once we are stranded again on the fact of malice, we piece together the other parts: the shame, the powerlessness, the terror, and the indifference; that you have been disturbed, always uncomfortable, always not enough, always wrong, a self-aware suicide since you put faith in Her. You have to stay stranded there a while to calm me down, but then you’re alone.
Last night, as suddenly as I was jogging through the foot and a half deep snow to drag mattresses back in place for the game I volunteered to lead, as suddenly as Matthew looked at us bewildered and said “Noah, you’re frollicking”, as suddenly as I was chasing children through the snow and scrubbing soup bowls in the kitchen, as suddenly as Mark told you “Noah, you’re an inspiration, the way you just give it all for camp”, as suddenly as I dove into the pot of workahol and blood-wine — you were alone. The reflux of solitude shivered through you.
You saw my reflection naked on the window to the woods, an image layered on the thick snow melting into twilight. You froze in the warm cabin room, believing the physical form of our being, not believing the shattered reality, the fallout of a fire lit in smothered hosts.
It’s easier to believe God when everyone around you does. Your belief faded slowly in the years at God’s camp. Now, I diminish when I have to listen to a sermon. The parents who ask how you pray and if you’ve been to that other church notice how thin you’ve gotten, ask if you are eating enough food. God is the bread — body broken for you — and I don’t eat Him.
When you learned about God in school, your professor talked radically opposite to our pastors: like in high school, when you asked them about the unimportance of the Old Testament. You and I didn’t understand why it needed to be read. Eventually, Matthew 22:37-40 became your Bible (with the honorary additions of Ecclesiastes and James). You loved the Lord your God with all our heart, mind, and soul. This is the first and greatest commandment, a second is equally important. Love, your neighbor as yourself. And if all the laws and demands of the prophets are based on those two commandments, the Old Testament de-summaris es those three verses into thirty-nine books. If God is Love, how do you not love God, how do you love without God? We thought this way for a smoldering while. After we did not levitate, become cloaked in songbirds, or recieve some other divine salute upon reciting our testimony, our manifest truth and I realized that Jesus did not have to be male, that our perfect center of global love was unilateral, we did not keep believing. G thought you stopped believing because of her.
The more distance you find from the relationship, the more problems you have remembering, that is, keeping the incomprehensible forgotten. Either dull or sharp enough to believe me. As the panic attacks thin, there’s nothing to wrench me from the memories. Nothing to stop you from remembering… swimming in your shorts at sunset with five others in their day clothes, the body containing our flesh forms — remembering the compliment she gave you only for her to deny it days later — standing with her naked in the lake as we waded into thin waves that licked light off the moon like liquid tongues, licked the sex off us in our proud shamelessness — hiding from her under the bed because you didn’t believe space could be requested: the panic had lasted for days and you were afraid — making reluctant love in the tabernacle because it was no longer holy to either of you and you were compromising — clapping a mosquito near her for her friend to turn and believe you slapped her, yelling at you until G, mercifully, told the truth — pacing the sanitized floors of a distant school, waiting for her to call, to find her drunk while you were working in an endless, white hall of papers you chose to write and isolation you chose to walk into the small hours — doing the dishes for her as her friends visited, sitting down, excited to actually be in a community again, only for her to insist on going to her room and fucking, we think because you embarrassed her. These memories slip over the levee in our mind, collecting in ditches, emphasizing the disrepair of our drainage system.
To protect yourself, she is just G. God, you believe me. You believe she might kill us. Her name, read, causes tremors. You’ve thought you saw her in Chicago, Sawyer, C.D.M.X, Lima, Portland, D.C. Anyone with long wavy, red or brown hair is her, although it could be cut or dyed — everyone is her. I never saw her for herself. She is everywhere.
But she is not here, at the camp, not this time. I know it. After I swallow the body and blood, the children start filing out. You see the other volunteers begin clearing the benches to the side of the tabernacle. We help. Your back hurts when you pick the benches up on your own, but you do it anyway. The floor is being cleared for an optional worship, and when the benches are moved and the band starts practicing, we remember how it looked when I was a child.
We go, through the snow to the building across the way and retrieve the plastic candles. You stand, with the box of fake fire in your hands, on the white ramp and look up at the stars, contemplating why you are aiding the worship of a God I don’t believe in. Why you perpetuate an illusion I’ve shaken.
You didn’t date G until the winter after you met: walking these wintry woods, lined with dying candles in paper bags — residue from a nocturnal cross country ski put on for campers. The ground glowing white, sliced by black trunks. A winding path, constellated by the remaining flames, slowly disappearing in the inverted night. In a pause, you kissed her, then held each other, then made snow angels in the blank earth.
You line the window sills and the skirt of the stage with fake fire. We go back out, into the winter to fetch green blankets from the basement of the neighboring building and speckle the tabernacle’s floor. I feel I’m fading into you. We fade back into the melodies you know by heart and the crowd of singers, into the scheduled, flickering multitudes of plastic candles, the kindness of a mother and daughter laughing together at the mother’s mistake, and the high-schoolers giving themselves to God in a place where you did. I look at Matthew with his eyes closed, singing in front of us. He lost his father two years ago, shared about the loss in this room. He smiles at you. Fuck it, Hallelujah. Hallelujah for a little while. We shiver, warmly. You and I sing
DoubleSpeak 