#creative nonfic

Born To Be Possessed

    On February 4, 2020, I attended a protest for the sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Doug Wilson was hosting a talk at the University of Idaho, even though he could speak at his own school, and the talk was to be on “The Virtue of Sexism.” A lot of fellow LGBTQIA+ men, women, and nonbinary folk attended, and we filled the room, took the front…

“Can I pray for you?” my therapist, Sharon, asked.

I worried that she could see my bemused expression through the static silence. Nobody had ever asked to pray for me before. When my dog died, an acquaintance proffered a limp sentiment in my Facebook inbox, “I’ll keep you in my prayers.” But then, it was a sentence, not a question.

My relationship with God was especially long-distance—He and I spoke through some kind of interlocutor, much like the phone through which Sharon and I spoke. Never did I try to extend my voice alone. I grew up in a staunchly secular household, so religion was just a taste I'd never acquire. Eves of worship that ushered in pastel-laden holidays and round, anemic wafers that dissolved on the tongue like tabs of expired acid. My mother was raised Roman Catholic, and she told us how my grandma had bowed to the postwar nuclear wraith and beset her household accordingly. Mom was as manicured as their front lawn; the only daughter, she was the original sin, sent to etiquette school to learn how to stand poised and upright before falling dutifully on her knees. Unimpressed, she escaped each Saturday night to punk rock shows in the city before catching a late-night bus back to the suburbs, just in time to attend the next morning’s mass, a Cinderella in her Sunday best. She moved out of her family home right away, and with that, she and Him hadn't spoken since.

In the heat of Sharon’s anticipatory pause, it occurred that she intended to pray for me immediately, right then and there, over the phone. She seemed unbothered that it might break policy or cross an ethical boundary. I thought about it for a moment and decided that it didn’t have to be serious. In fact, I smiled at the prospect of gaining a new anecdote to tell to my close friends. “Guys,” I’d say to my roommates after the appointment. “Guess what my therapist did today.” Inevitably, I'd then punctuate the story with a quippy button, something like, "You always hear about people advocating to separate church and state, but is this what they mean by it—church and state of mind?" If we laughed, it would've been all worth it.

It took me a moment to return to the moment and remember who Sharon was, what she was asking, why she was so ready to turn to a higher power. At once, I felt a familiar urgency: What if it works? The drama of it working was alluring, perfumed.

I’d started talking to Sharon when I felt as if I couldn't walk anymore. The heavy feeling wasn’t new—like a tedious relative, it had long overstayed its welcome. Cycles of over-and-over and again and again, a type of dust that can be cleaned but then settles in thicker. The weight sometimes lifted—there was contentment and confidence in those smiling bouts, but they always precipitated a hangover that mourned its own arrival. The ways I tried to lift myself out of the heaviness were always unhealthy, like the odd drunken evening or something sharper. These mechanisms were beyond tragic, but their greatest fault was never working. Fruitless was trying to conquer heaviness, it seemed—in fact, in my late teens, I quit food for a summer or so to no avail. Humour fit in when only words were available. By the time I moved out of my parents’ house, there were anthologies of looseleaf stashed under my childhood bed, memoirs in which I pared myself down in strange and unnatural ways. I wrote me out, putting me somewhere. When I moved out, I left them there—I stopped writing, and the heaviness returned to my hands. I lugged it to the grocery store and the bus stop and the laundromat and back home again. I grew heavier on each commute, and whatever I collected, I was too afraid to unpack. It was a hopeless observance that was forever looking, forever avoiding being looked at. If prayer could ease the burden, why not? God, I hope this will work.

For a moment, I worried that my agnosticism would pose an issue for Sharon. Maybe, if a nonbeliever was the target of an intercessory prayer, it’d be like shooting blanks. There was something profoundly sad about this possibility, and I cursed Sharon’s blessings before she could say them aloud. An unheard prayer summoned the same brand of tragedy as a letter returned to its sender, a personal ad in the classifieds, a missed call to the wrong number. 

I’d questioned my faith before, and maybe that gave me some currency. I'd once befriended a gaggle of Christian girls in my class. They wore gilded cross-necklaces and clothes from the nice stores, and their moms were sugary-sweet, and each week they got to go to church together. I always liked the idea of getting invited. I once went with my grandma. I struggled to keep my eyes open during the scripture readings, but it was only because the building made me feel calm; in perfect symmetry, each polished pew faced a smiling apse, and the ceilings were tall and made me feel small. I began telling the girls at school that I, too, was a Christian. ‘Prove it,’ one of them once challenged me. I couldn't.

I was also concerned that Sharon's prayer might be strained by the phone's metal mesh, stretched too thin as it reached for the cell tower and up to where I assumed it needed to go. To me, electricity always seemed antithetical to the prayerful, like when a kid I babysat showed me the Bible app on his iPad. Prayer was supposed to be raw, unlit. I thought about confession, or what I’d seen of it on TV: a crown of candle's amber dusk, a cathartic rasp to an ancient man on the other side of a teak cubicle. Quickly, I fashioned Sharon as the old man, the phone as our teak wall, the static grain of wires and tin humming like a distant, off-key psalm.

I’d seen therapists in-person before, but I had trouble looking them in the eye. Though I didn’t have tales of clandestine affairs or crimes to confess, my anxieties nonetheless made my shoulders fold in on themselves like I was a guilty suspect, and the placid gaze of a therapist burned through me like the upper hand of a seasoned detective. But Sharon was across the country, and from our first session, I came prepared to talk. She had called every second Thursday for almost six months, and before each appointment, I put my chair in the far corner of my bedroom and shoved a towel under the door. I wanted to be honest and loud about it. I didn’t cry during our sessions, just spoke. This was a good thing; nobody had ever known me so well. 

When Sharon began the prayer, she opened with the same address that my grandma recited before each meal. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and braced myself. As I sank into my chair, my mind sifted through her words—some sounded foreign to me through the metallic debris, and they passed each other urgently as if they were all rushing off somewhere. She sandwiched my name between unfamiliar aphorisms and spoke in a rehearsed meter that was distractingly poetic, though I could make out her final pleas to God. She asked him to bring me good things, nice thoughts. She asked him, "Bring Ruby peace." I began to cry. "Amen."

We were out of time. We booked another appointment, then I hung up the phone and sat in the silence. I expected a revelatory sensation to follow—not something material, like the peripheral pageant of a halo atop my head. No, I scavenged in the stillness for light and lightness, for that divine symmetry I felt in church with my grandma. I waited, and I wait.

All I truly knew was that I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. I floated to the living room, told them what Sharon had done for me, and we had a good laugh.

When I inherited the pages, the old diaries, I read myself again. Everything I’d ever felt was divided by generous, misused commas. There were big words I didn't understand anymore, barely understood back then. The girl on the page was outdated, but she was well-read, and read well. I agreed with her on everything, right down to her name. She wasn't gospel, but she made a lot of points.

A Dream Of Mary

CW: Religion, suicidal thoughts mention, homophobia     I dreamt of St. Mary’s Academy again. The hallways twist inside my mind like a virus. I can walk them in my sleep, I can navigate them through my dreams, but I do not know what I’m looking for. Last night I went to a play, and I saw my name on a whiteboard where my performances on that stage lay ranked. My friends cheered with me as we…

The Normalcy Of Veins

CW: Suicide ideology; suicidal thoughts; violence; blood; COVID-19; toxic religion; homophobia; hate-crime mention; Adjective: normal1. Conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expectedNoun: normal; plural noun: normals1. The usual, average, or typical state or conditionOxford Languages At the time of writing, I posted a story on Facebook last week about a young gay man being murdered for…