#erik bryan

What I thought about instead, while I sat there in a pew under a 300-year-old roof, was how I lost my faith at such a young age, but have never really looked back, and is there something wrong with me? (I don’t think so, but how would I know?) I thought about how loud the roar of Northern Boulevard was just outside the windows, and how much quieter (and therefore holier) it must have felt in this room a century before. I thought about the initials carved into the pew in front of me next to the pictures of what looked like the boat from the movie Jaws and what was either a robot or a child’s approximation of the human form. I thought about singing “100 Bottles of Beer” to myself and immediately discarded the thought because of how tedious it would be to me. I thought a great deal about the Zelda game I’m currently working my way through and how I would have preferred to have been playing it right then. I wondered how often someone farted audibly in one of these meetings. I thought about cracking my knuckles, one of my nervous habits, but refrained due to the attention it might have drawn to me. I listened to the HVAC kick in and clang as it struggled to heat the old hall. I thought about the novel draft I’ve been revising and doing research for, and how terribly tiresome it all is, and what a cheap hack I am, because I like to punish myself. I thought about all of the family I saw over Thanksgiving, and how dearly I love them, and how tragic was our loss in September when our grandmother passed. I thought about her faith as a Southern Methodist, and how little she ever tried to convince any of us to believe as she did and how either strong or respectful that was on her part. I thought about my other grandma, who’d helped raised us after our parents’ divorce, and how she passed back in 2004 and how I wish I’d been closer to her as an adult. I thought about the space left in our family by her absence and how I’ll feel it again when I’m home for Christmas in a few weeks. A hundred other thoughts came and went just as blithely as I sat there in the uncomfortable silence around me.