A writer’s spot

An homage to Mother Julian, who’s book is the oldest surviving copy of a Christian mystic revelation from a woman’s perspective.

[essenceofnorwich]

Brother

A Retelling of Matthew 4

Do you remember the pantheon? The days of endless splendour and relishing the presence of one another?

Do you remember the endless moments of arguing, of learning each other, or pressing in just the right place to incite fury in each other?

I couldn’t forget.

You were always kinder than I could ever hope to be. Far more lenient and understanding. You inspired me and delighted me in all of your goodness. You reminded me of the best parts of existence.

As we stand at the highest place in the country where you have been placed for the fulfillment of our Father’s prophecy and empty promise to humanity, I think of all of that small infinity together. I hold out my hand to you to pull you out and you hear me demand your subservience the same way he did.

Please.

Don’t kill yourself for them.

You don’t know what that suffering will entail. Their burdens will be heaped on your shoulders and deep through every muscle fibre and bone. You don’t understand the horrors of what they have done. What they will do. What will be done in your name. It will tear you apart worse than their nails could.

Please.

I know what awaits you. It’s worse than what you think.

I haven’t spoken to you in millennia because of him. Because of his reach.

Please.

Please let me spare you. As I tried to do all those eons ago in my leaving.

Don’t go.

I would forsake all of humanity rather than lose you. You will not return the same.

Our father made us for these lives. Please let me pull you from it.

Reminding you of his call for you to create hope within a hopeless creation only incites the words he spoke over you since your inception. Stones to bread is far simpler than the ultimate goal he has for you.

Grant me this. Grant me your salvation instead of theirs. Undeserving.

Please, brother. Please.

[essenceofnorwich]

A Pretty, Ugly Thing

I feel like I have to glamorize it. Make this heavy, aching grief beautiful. Happy. My father told me it is good that we can laugh even with tears. I understand that he most likely meant that it is good we can have joy despite the circumstances. But years upon years of having to cover up my tears, of having to put on a smile with my jaw clenching tight to hold in the way my lip wobbles. Having my sadness picked apart and rationalized away. My heart heard him say it is better to be happy. Do not hold your grief for longer than a second.

My grief has always sliced me open, flayed my bleeding palms. Numbness. Quiet. Still. Don’t hold your grief. Instead of laying my grief to rest in the right places I’ve had to swallow it whole.

I’ve felt I have to make up for my imperfections. Make up for my works being written by me. Make my words irreproachable. My work spotless.

I feel I cannot share my grief because it is too raw, too ugly a thing. So my words— pent up— written on parchment in a pile to burn— echo in the chasm of my mind. On repeat for only my eyes and ears. My throat is raw and I remain silent as the tears roll down the sides of my face and into my pillowcase while I stare up at my ceiling and wish for more time. For understanding.

He’s the first person I’ve lost since I stopped believing in a heaven and a hell. The first person I realized I would have no more time with. There are no more chances to talk. No more opportunities to get ice cream. No more days to sit on the porch and drink coffee and lick jam covered fingers. No way to tell him that I don’t believe in his god anymore. Just my memories.

Not believing in heaven is far more devastating than I had ever considered. Because now it faces me directly. A skull staring down at me from the skies. The grim reaper that comes for us all. I’ve spent most of my life considering death. A lot more time thinking about dying than any child should. But I somehow forget every time just how sharply it stings.

[essenceofnorwich]

walking sticks

My grandfather was a gentle sort of strong. Like a whittling knife. Determined. He wielded himself with a resolution of being right and would constantly seek to carve the world around him into shapes he finds most beautiful.

Keep carving. Carving away at the frown. At the wobbling chin. Rake smile lines into the corners of your eyes instead of tears.

The summer sun lingering on the horizon with long, slow drags peeling back the bark of dried sticks carefully selected for their durability. Sanding splinters and rough edges. Bible verses written with felt tip markers. Printed neatly and thoughtfully.

Selfishly, I wish the stories of my grandfather weren’t the ones printed on tissue paper that I hear in my sleep with hate coated in empirical love.

Love looks like a lot of different things. And sometimes it’s sitting across the table from someone espousing their undying belief that—

You

—many people deserve to suffer for eternity. Sometimes it’s remembering vanilla hazelnut flavoured bitterness with apple pie and card games. Somehow wishing there was more time.

I used to think that angry was my hardest emotion. I was never allowed to feel angry, so I carried it like a shameful, secret thing. A festering pool of loneliness that I would cover up with a smile and pretty affirmation.

Love is tears streaming down cheeks, throats swelling and nose dripping. Regret and remembrance all in one moment. Saying goodbye is hard, and goodbye forever is infinitely worse. Love is wishing you didn’t notice the rattle in their breath and repeat the sound again and again and again. Love is noticing the hurt in the first place.

I realize now that the hardest emotion for me to feel and experience is sadness. Sad was always a performance. An embarrassment. Something to be hidden by anger, by anticipation for an experience beyond the aching, wobbling, consuming nature of the wretched thing.

The grief aches. Like that whittling knife to the ribs. Holding my shuddering frame aloft with the walking stick I carved when I was twelve and his hands were still gentle and strong enough to teach.

[essenceofnorwich]

What do you do with your love?

I bleed my love. I laugh because of it. I cry. I miss having it be alive and well and cherish having the memory of it.

I live with the knowledge of what that love gave me.

Is it hard believing there is no life beyond death?

Not usually. This life now that I get to live is so painfully wonderful. It is difficult and harsh and yet the sky is so blue and wonderful. And yet the flowers are so soft and supple under my fingertips. I get to live right now. I am thrilled that I have the opportunity to live it well.

Is it hard to let go of the ideas I had been taught about seeing people again and not having to miss them? Yes.

But I have found that there are friends who have taught me loss so beautifully in this life.

Sometimes I want to write something like the words that make tears sting my eyes and my sinuses fill as I try to stifle sobs. I hold my love just as dearly as you. I wish you didn’t see it as less because I hold mine differently.

[essenceofnorwich]

sometimes the universe has millions of secrets and unanswerable longings… other times she is cat wanting pets only on her behind because you didn’t let her sit on you the whole day and she’s a little mad about it

[essenceofnorwich]

The lies I screamed

It’ll all make sense

It’ll all make sense

It’ll all make sense

IT WILL ALL MAKE SENSE!

How often have I screamed it at myself to drown out the voice of doubt, of the anguish who blooms in my chest like a knife wound in water?

It’ll all make sense

Had I ever stopped to question if it mattered if my suffering had purpose? If it mattered what type of sense was made?

Everything happens for a reason. And have I not always thought that phrase meant that things happened to produce a certain future?

All things happen for a reason.

And those reasons are the faults and the plights of all of the men who came before me. They happened because of and not for the purpose of.

It’ll all make sense.

I don’t know if there was ever beauty in my questioning. Only unbridled anger or quiet rage. No in between. Anger that extrapolated into inferno or anger that was snuffed out. The beauty in the questioning was only ever sadness and not recognizing myself in the mirror. Disappointment for not understanding.

It’ll all make sense.

If I were to be the great translator of the God— the one to bring candles and torches to those isolated in darkness so as not to blind them and injure their eyes. If I were to be preacher to the nations— how could I lack the ability to understand the cruelty of god?

It’s all make sense

It will Never make sense.

Not in a way my downcast eyes will understand.

[essenceofnorwich]

holy intuition or divine disbelief

In having space. Moments for myself. And then coming back into my family’s embrace… I can’t help but notice the divide. I didn’t see my mother for a month and now I notice every instance when she speaks something that reminds me she would view me and my beliefs as heathenish and sinful. She does not have the luxury of separating me from my beliefs so she may still love me, but the hatred and distaste for the thoughts and ideas that make up who I am would be underlying. Unspoken.

And I find yet more insidious weeds that have infiltrated the core of how I think. My parents remind me that any intuition, any idea I have that might save some grief later— checking the rental’s couch for my sister’s wallet because my dad wasn’t sure if it had been checked, thinking to go into a particular store because it might have the exact spoon my mother was searching for— is a direction of their god’s holy spirit.

When I don’t have the same thoughts I think to blame only myself for walking away. For choosing disbelief in their god of atrocities. And not the simple fact that every human brain is different and is wont to have different ideas. A simple explanation. A ridiculous folly for me to think that I’ve lost something because on three instances I did not have the same thought to double check something.

[essenceofnorwich]

see what your god has done

I remember writing once of seeing the people I love most in my patients. My cousin’s eyes. My father’s frown.

I see god in the eyes of a grieving mother. I see god in the blood trails left in the wake of surgery. Of death.

Look at what your god has done, you fools. Can you not see the emptiness of its love? The shallowness of its kindness?

Look at what your god has done. A song lyric. Meant to encourage and inspire. Vitriol burns through my veins.

Do they choose to walk blindly?

Indoctrination leaves an acrid taste on my tongue, burns my eyes. This ignorance has played witness to countless deaths. Corpses walking with polished smiles. The zombie apocalypse has already come and taken millions. A virus of hatred and brainless following.

Choosing to see only the lovely coincidences of goodness has blinded you to the hurt and injustice of the world. I could lay countless travesties of humanity before your eyes and you would choose to blame humans for their faults. But if one good thing happens you can easily credit it to your Lord? How is only one type of happening in life caused by an omnipotent god?

[essenceofnorwich]

was i satisfactory?

I was a fool to believe that forever would last longer than my usefulness to you.

Did I not maintain the paragon of purity and innocence to be dirtied? Did my raw humanness scare you away? Were you not satisfied with the part you wanted me to play?

The feeling of you is still carved into my lips. My smile lines were etched by the grins I gave to appease you. I can map out the places where you touched— flesh that is stretched over a different body that is still the same as it was all those years ago. I have to close my eyes sometimes to cleave myself from her because as I’m learning to love the spots and curves of myself. I can’t help but remember the whisper of your breath on the same skin I’m trying to appreciate.

I feel like I’ve blocked from my memory so many pieces of pain that have cobbled together the clumsy human I am today. But I know that I spent years yearning for your approval and seeking your attention. I can remember the hours tailoring photos and captions and writing romance novels with your caress in the forefront of my thoughts.

Were you satisfied?

That you played me for a fool who didn’t realize that she would never be enough for you because of your long stretching hands and greedy eyes? Was I anything more than a joke to you? Did it bring you pleasure listening to me ramble about the future and my hopes of building it with you as you made love to the images of other women? My friends. Were you pleased that I trusted you to be tender with me?

Well maybe it would make you feel victorious if I say that my writing still holds ghosts of you?

And I know I don’t exist for your service and to complete you because I am my own person. I am one hundred percent of a human. But I still think about how I spilled the very heart of my soul into your cup and you poured it out.

[essenceofnorwich]

Moste Eville

I watch in the audience as you weave your woes of indignant superiority from a pulpit. And yet you claim that I am far more sinful and dirty than you could ever be.

If my love for the wrong sort of people is a crime, I would gladly be imprisoned. If you are holy and clean with hatred spewing from your pores then I wish to be kept as far away from you as this life will allow. And the next.

[essenceofnorwich]

Forever and back again

Why is it that my whole life I’ve been waiting? I feel like I am a moment, a breath, a happenstance away from becoming all I was meant to be. And I’ve been learning that this growing does not stop and that I will never be satisfied being static. Because time in her infinity keeps moving and affecting change. I’m a few months away from running my hands through the long grass. I’m a few days from laying in the snow. I’m moments from losing my breath. Seconds from letting go. It is hard to exist now. To do adventure as she finds me. I feel like any time I have, people have been nothing but disappointed.

I don’t know what’s going on with my brain, but existing feels really hard right now.

[essenceofnorwich]

The roots

I keep picking guilt from my branches. It is a festering, thorny weed that I did not sow. It peels open my eyes to stare upon ceilings and windows and my blanket covered toes. How do I get rid of it without burning myself from the inside out?

And isn’t it hilarious that they claim religion is a cure from the problems of the world? As though they are not the insidious trespassers who poured poison into the soil.

Eden is calling for their heads on gilded plates of gold, their tongues already forged in silver.

I see the church as the propagators of the downfall of society. The hate they call love has rotten too much of the good and the beautiful. My teeth ache at the saccharine falsity of a smile on church property. My chest is hollow.

Father?

Were you ever there to forsake me?

Or did you leave your work to the crafters of hemlock and nightshade— the so called body of Christ, knowing they would bring your unjust wrath well enough on their own.

[essenceofnorwich]

Escape

I remember the question in perfect detail. It devoured me. I don’t think my answer was actually my belief, just my initial response.

What changed your mind about your faith?

For something that consumed me for my whole life, my answer seemed small. It was years of hating myself and the people around me for the micro and macro aggressions towards people I thought we were supposed to love.

But really…

My faith was lost between blood stained thighs and borne out of cries that passed cracked lips. Screams that went unlistened to, but not unheard.

My faith died drowned in guilt for being human and missing young adults gatherings sobbing on the couch.

Purging myself of faith was a war. Is a war. And the few battles I name were the goriest, but they are not even the ones with the most casualties.

The church made a general out of me at ten years old. I don’t see how they can be surprised that a child soldier turned adult carved out her own place when she realized what she was fighting for was hurting the very people she was trying to protect.

[essenceofnorwich]

Now i lay me down to sleep

There are very few instances when I can recall my negative memories. For most of my life my mind has worked to erase that which made me feel anything outside the realm of joy and peace that was allotted to my Christian bubble.

I do recall one day at youth group, when we were actually speaking about God and the Bible, which is what I wanted every week to be like because I yearned for knowledge more than spending time with people who wished I were someone different. We were talking about what we would want to be remembered for at our funerals. Not the most upbeat of topics… but thought provoking for a bunch of barely teenagers. I remember someone stating they wanted to be remembered for their hockey skills, and another still wanting to be remembered for their voice. I had actually thought about this for ages before we were asked in the group. My answer was ready and I remember feeling like I was vibrating in my seat as it was finally my turn.

I said I want to be known for being kind.

Because it is something I want to grow. I want people to feel seen and appreciated in their humanness when in my presence. I want them to feel appreciated. Remembered.

Because it does not come naturally for me. My memory is sporadic at the best of times, and I often have to write things down about the people I care about so I can actually remember properly.

I remember their laughter more than anything. Then the heat in my face. It is how I try to describe every embarrassed character I have ever written. Scrunching into myself. Craving the ability to turn back time and prevent the words or to have the ability to scrub them from everyone’s brains. I didn’t understand what I had said wrong. I don’t remember who said it, but they asked me incredulously: “like mother Theresa?”

I think it was supposed to be a compliment. Even said with derision that cut to my bone, and I agreed silently in hopes they would just move on. My friends at school called me by the title of the head of a nunnery for years because of this story. And I know they meant well. And it was funny!

But my heart aches every time I hear someone say something similar. Because it means I was not alone in my hunger.

I wanted people to awaken to the horrible reality of our world by the way I would care for them. Want them to realise that kindness does not have the structure of fairy floss. Kindness is steel and blood and tears, and sitting in the darkness of the room with sobs wracking your chest as you grieve the unfairness of life. Kindness, and trying to right the wrongs that should not be. Making the world fair.

[essenceofnorwich]

Never have I ever

I watched a video recently, of someone talking about the cultish tendency to terrify yourself into believing the ultimatum of Christian shaped religions. That honey coated promise of heaven, with the core threat of eternal damnation. A bitter pill to swallow, even on the days where my throat isn’t clogged with all the self hatred and regret that I won’t allow to become my reality.

The biggest change in thought for me has to be the moment I realized that I would rather burn in hell for eternity than live like someone’s life is worth less than mine. Even if Christianity is true. Even if I will suffer and be tormented once I hop off the end of my mortal coil— at least I will know that I lived and chose to live well.

[essenceofnorwich]

In memoriam

I imagine my funeral more often than I’d care to admit. Not dying. Never the reason for it. But the event! I can picture it in sparkling detail.

A sad lonely church. A place that would make me cringe if I were to walk through the doors. My spirit. My ghost. They would be nowhere near the venue.

I’m sure there would be some nice words from my family about my spiritual history. Some condolences for themselves in hoping I would be in their heaven. As my soul would be cackling from the crackling seventh level of hell. Not that I was ever actually taught the layers of hell were true.

I think I lost my salvation in the same worn out laundry basket where I toss my stained panties and soiled bed sheets.

I can imagine the songs they’ll play. Melodies that chill me to my bone now— of hollowed out happiness, hypocrisy and white supremacy.

All of the attendants believing that I believed to my last breath. That I believed that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the Hebrew God (the god they like to pretend is not Jewish at all). That the Bible was flawless. And that I agreed that women should be silent and owned.

They will not read the works I have written. They will not talk about my dream to have a home for my community and not a perfect husband and three kids like all my straight cousins.

They will not mention that my blood ran pink, purple and blue. That the smiles I put on for church were emptied of all meaning. That I often was not happy. Because it was my pretty pretty joy that made them feel better that they broke me apart to fit me into their Christian shaped mould.

I think of how my best friend and my cousin will be the only two who know that I listen to shitty music and write erotica and dream of worlds where the word socialism meant caring for people and not North Korea or the fall of the USSR.

I can’t decide if I’m sad. Or resigned. Or happy that I’ll pull one last great heist— having died a woman who bloomed despite the cold shadow of the church’s imperial might.

Duped them into blessing how I am more curses and witchcraft than blood soaked redemption. Deceived them into lauding me for being a light for the might of the church when I’m reality I took every private opportunity to tear apart the ideals that twisted my heart out of shape. I find it is more human and less cross shaped these days. As it should be.

[essenceofnorwich]

No place

If I’m told that I have a place in heaven I’ll protest most strongly. What paradise can compare to the feeling of her arms around me? The whispers in the middle of the night with cackles poorly smothered? How could I be satisfied with heaven when I’ve been living with moments of paradise that feel like sun soaking through my bones and everything good and right?