God

Tickle me emo.

Encuentro (La Cita) (1959) by Remedios Varo

Where do you find your god, mine lives under wet leaves, between the mud and the sky, between magma and outer space, between your thumb and pointer finger, between us.

Why do you need your god, mine lets me be my wretched self like no one else does, mine loves me too much, he’ll never let me go but he toys with the idea out of boredom, he fucks around with little signs to scare me out of my skin.

The only way to tolerate your dependence on god is by finding another one. Luckily they’re everywhere, under the bricks on the patio, threaded into your good socks and also your bad ones, the ones you never wear, don’t throw them away. We need extra gods to keep us from overinvesting, bowing too low, listening to the same stories over and over, pretending we’ve never heard them before. How many years can you be polite to a divine entity, repeat the right words until it feels less like love and more like survival?

How do you find your god, mine is screaming outside with the hawks, mine is my pretty twin, sometimes too ugly for words, sometimes as empty as heaven, but he likes to pretend we belong together, he likes to act like we match, secretly he’s searching for some eternal light over my shoulder, he wants to be created in her image and not vice versa, he can’t support one follower let alone a whole church, he wants to kneel until his knees bruise, can you blame him, who doesn’t?

When do you find your god, mine shows up when I give up on what I was supposed to become and listen to the rain instead, rapid but growing lighter now, diminuendo, less and less ambitious, let the dogs run around in the mud on a cool summer morning, let them smell the air and hunt for small animals under the bushes, we all need more time to be our savage selves.

***

My daughter drew a picture of a girl with words on the sides but she covered them with her hand so I couldn’t read them.

“Don’t read my emo words, they’re embarrassing,” she said.

“I write emo words all over the place,” I said. “What else is there to do?”

***

My god whispers to me through a wet breeze before the morning thunderstorm, telling me that the most embarrassing things are the only things worth doing, like lightning just after dawn, like low gray clouds that hang over the earth, between the hot core of the planet and the chill of infinite darkness. My god tells me I’ve earned the right to humiliate myself, I’m all grown up and it’s time, two breasts weighed like chicken and then thrown away, two big children yelling about “Game of Thrones,” everything belongs together now, digging in the yard on a hot afternoon, having a glass of bad wine with my mother in the buggy heat, talking about her neighbors, thinking about your body, what matters more than skin, what matters less than being what they thought you should be?

We murmur precious prayers to ourselves every day but then we forget them, surrendering to a series of mundane interruptions, cycling through erasure, insomnia, amnesia, we don’t celebrate our survival, we don’t rejoice in honor of our brittle bones, still alive on the face of the planet through some miracle, we don’t see the divine at work in our cell phones, we don’t hear ourselves through the boozy chatter. Each morning we remind ourselves that everything we do is too small, too stupid, don’t look at my emo words, don’t listen to my emo thoughts, don’t let the wet air into our dry house, shut out the loud noises that scare the animals who live here, seal it all up like Tupperware, but my god is out there in the wet grass napping with fat worms, my god is up there in the wet trees screaming for more, open the windows.

You think it’s almost over but

you can do whatever you want

starting

now.

Keep collecting gods like old coins, hoard all of those blessings and ask for even more, still humble like they need you to be, still crying out for mercy, still full of that faith they crave so much, every god so pervy for devotion. But all gods are avoidant and codependent at the same time, always waking you up in the middle of the night with their loneliest thoughts but then they never text back, always breadcrumbing you until you find religion again. Anyway what do you want, a whole new paradigm, we only have so many years left, we have to work with whatever they give us, god only knows what comes next, cartoon lightning bolts fifteen miles away, birds singing precious prayers for the sky alone, stop drinking and remember everything, learn to honor these juicy bones, learn to celebrate your clumsy ordinary life, dance at every party like you alone know the moral to this story, it’s not too late to open all the windows, it’s cool outside today, these gods are playing the long game, patient seduction in each raindrop, let it all in and scream for more.