Devout/Devouring

The air in this room is thick with cinnamon and the ghosts of almonds. They chatter in the other room, a warm river of voices flowing around a rock; which is me, here at the window. The street lamps below halo in the December damp, turning the plane trees into bony hands holding up the night. A strand of tinsel trembles on the sill with my every breath.

I can feel the old prayer in my throat, a smooth stone I’ve carried for years: Let me be good, let me be gentle. I am angry and I still believe, desperately, in a god. I fear the part of me that knows the geometry of a clean uppercut, that holds the memory of how satisfying it is to make something snap. That coiled thing lives behind my ribs, a feral second heart that beats with a rhythm of hate-them, hate-you, hate-this. It is the part they’ve never seen, the part I ration out in private, pounding it into the heavy bag until my knuckles sing. They made a diplomat of me, a translator of silences, a shock absorber for every familial tremor. My independence is an insult. My need, a disgrace. I am their mirror, and they flinch and what they see.

The scent of the picana still clings—the rich steam of the broth, the peppercorns like dark eyes in the stew. It was a taste of a home I’ve never had, served in a home that isn’t mine. It sits in my stomach like a promise I can’t digest. My mother ladled it out, her eyes asking a question my tongue refused to form.

God, if you are there, do not hide me for better examples. Do not sand down my edges into something palatable. Love me in the guilt. Love me with the guilt. Love the girl who wants to be hold and the beat who wants to break the world. The contradiction is a fire in my chest. I am so terribly afraid that to be worth it, I must first become someone else—someone whose hands are only for holding, whose voice is only for soothing, whose heart is not a rotten fruit; one half devout, and the other half screaming.

Faith is not the antidote to this pain. It is just another layer of it. To believe in love so vast while hating the creature you are—it splits you open wider. I am not cleansed. I am excavated. The anger isn’t holy. It’s just mine. It won’t go away. The hating won’t just go away. It simmers beneath the prayer, a parallel liturgy: am I doomed to this cycle of nothingness? Can I get back all that I have lost?

From the park at night, a distant cheer escapes. Someone is happy. The tinsel shivers. I hold my hand up to the glass; they are just hands, capable of prayer, capable of violence. The hungered beast, the red eyes and the bared teeth, stares at me from the dark. It waits patiently, ready to rip me into pieces. I can almost feel it’s hot breath when I sleep, it’s claws grazing me, ready to rip me out of my life on a moment’s notice. It believes in nothing, and in it’s nothingness, it is so very close to hating everyone.

I press my forehead to the cool pane. God will not resolve this. God is just the name I give to the terrible, silent space between the person I was supposed to be and the raw, rotten thing I am. A space as vast and empty as the park at night, where every cheer from the light feels like it comes from another world.

“God didn’t hide me or fix me. He loves me when I’m guilty.” - Father Judd Duplencity