Here
True romance.
Dancers Under the Starry Sky (1891-1976), Max Ernst
I’m here for you. I’m not just here for you, I’m here for you and you and you. I’m here to tell you and you and you and you and you and also you — yes you with the eyeballs inside your skull and the feet resting heavily beneath your desiccated knees, you with the sagging heart, the tattered imagination, the self-loathing spirit — that your body is an empty cathedral. Turn the lights on.
It will take time to oil the cracked pews and wash fifty feet of stained glass. Don’t overthink it. You’ve got some time, actually. Open the heavy wooden doors to let in the frigid winter air, let in the sly pink wink of dawn, let in some stray sparrows and cardinals. They just want to get a closer look at the adorable dollhouse that these sad spirits made in honor of their favorite god, the one with the big beard like a tree growing upside down, that old guy who blesses the poor but doesn’t pull them out of hell by hand, the trickster who damns the rich but doesn’t make his artisanal punishments detectable to the naked eye. He damns them slowly and subtly, converting them and their children into addicts, amplifying their insecurities through the back door of their vanities, whispering in their ears that no matter what they own and who they become, they will always be nothing and nowhere.
I mean, he isn’t entirely wrong about that.
Or maybe his crafts are nondiscriminatory. Maybe he wants everyone alive to doubt themselves, to question their faith, to beseech him from the cross, because that’s his favorite form of entertainment. Maybe he even wants the true believers to look crazy, crying out from the desert, abandoned by earth and sky, faithful down to the moment their severed heads hit the platter for the queen.
But I’m here to tell you and you, and also you and you and you, with your broken hands in your lap and your weathered soul bouncing around inside your skin like a sad ghost, that the sparrows and the cardinals are wrong. Your body’s cathedral is an instrument waiting to be tuned. Attune yourself to its song, let some early winter frost rush around those tarnished chalices, let the weird bells sound in some uncharted key between sharp and sharper, between flatter and flattest, let the pinkest wisps of dawn fill your exhausted lungs.
You wanted to believe that all belief was corrupt. You wanted to think that simply because you wandered out in search of faith and followed the wrong gods off a tall cliff, you yourself are easily corrupted, and now your job is to resist all wandering, all faith, all whimsy, all reckless, savage, selfish divinity. You have chosen a straighter and narrowing path into a well-lit office cubicle, where you will dutifully mouth the appropriate sounds and that will be enough for your ungainly spirit, looming awkwardly at the edges of the party, gripping a paper napkin, barely balancing a tiny plate covered in overpriced aged cheeses and cured meats, almost managing to sound adequately mediocre but failing and falling and flailing instead, almost appearing regular and reasonable and resistant to the drowning sounds inside, some false god wearing your teenage spirit down, telling her that no matter how long she waits for sublime inspiration to arrive she will always be a smudge on the map, like a smashed gnat on its way somewhere once and now just a colorful artifact of lost hope.
I’m here for you and I’m here for your spirit, too. I’m here to tell your spirit, bitch listen up, we can’t take time to eliminate unnecessary metaphors anymore, we have to heap them in messy piles because this is urgent, trust me. We can’t make sure that our pockets aren’t inside out and our hair is brushed and yesterday’s eyeliner isn’t smeared in the corners of our eyes, because we aren’t here to make a good impression to people who can’t find their way out of the straighter and narrower and narrowest resignations. We aren’t here to follow them down those increasingly tiny rabbit holes, where no one fits anymore, where only nothing and no one can squeeze their way in. Sweetums, we are bigger than that, I am telling your spirit and also you and you and your clumsy spirits, too, weeping in the corner of the party, telling you they want to go home now, they need you, they need more, telling you they hate you, telling you that you’re the only one who can save them from themselves.
Hug your spirits close but be firm with them. Tell them that you will never leave them, not on purpose, but they can’t always look for you, you won’t always be here, they’ll find a new cathedral eventually, so the only way for them to feel good is through the cleansing power of hard work, doing something that feels arbitrary a lot of the time but isn’t, something that feels okay but not great but not wrong, something tiring, the meaning comes from getting tired, the grounding properties arrive when you’ve washed fifty feet of stained glass even though you never believed in god in the first place.
Tell your agnostic spirit to stand up straight for a second but don’t worry about moisturizing consistently, tell her that there is no secret to anything anywhere, the only secret is that you are everything and everywhere, you are more glorious than time and space itself, your job is not to prove it, your job is not to be better at glory than anyone else, your job is not to drop to your knees in worship or to preach to a vast audience. Your job is merely to scrub these marble floors, look at these enormous fucking tiles, four feet by four feet of polished marble, think about where this goddamn rock came from while you wash it clean, and listen to the graceful melody floating through your bloodstream like the pinkest wisps of dawn.
This will feel like a dirty indulgent fix but it’s not. This sugar is not going to kill you. You don’t have to long for this when it disappears. You are not my lover and I am not yours. All ingestion, absorption, and permeability is real, but all allegiances, alliances, and acts of ownership and possession are imaginary, a figment of a primitive idea that gained ground thanks to insecure spirits being told one too many times that they didn’t exist. Baby, don’t be like them. Stop seeking revenge to pay back the gods for blessing you with the insults and injuries of being alive. Get down on the ground and scrub these rocks until you’re realigned with what you are.
Existence itself is bliss. True romance, the truest. You have a gift, many gifts, infinite gifts. You are as brilliant as the most brilliant and as talented as the most talented and taller than the sky and wider than the sea. I’m losing you now, you don’t believe me, but keep listening, you restless insatiable fool you: I am here for you, too. When you honor this cathedral with your humility and your grief, with your hard work and your hope, with your self-doubt and your longing, you honor everyone and everything. Share your gifts without hesitation. No one will get it. You will feel like nothing. You will go nowhere. That’s exactly where you want to be, trust me. Going places is for suckers, lol. Everything and everyone is right here, and the good ones see you clearly already.
Don’t let those gods tell you that you’re not hot enough for this magic, don’t accept their hand-crafted dread and self-doubt, don’t welcome their vengeful corrosion into your heart. Compassion for your tangled spirit is your highest purpose, because it gives you space for other twisted souls, because it makes you ready to be there for him and her and them and those, because you are full of love already and everything and everyone is secretly here for you. Secretly here. For you.
We believe in you. Listen up. We really do. Let the weird bells of our faith sound in some uncharted key between sharp and sharper, between flatter and flattest, let the pinkest wisps of our love fill your exhausted heart.
Now it’s time for you to believe in you, too.
And you and you. And you and you and you and them and her and him and those and that and theirs and yours and you.
Thank you for reading Ask Molly. I really am here for you, motherfucker! Give your awkward teenage spirit a hug and let her sit on your couch and talk about herself for a few hours today, she needs you, she does, she really does, brush her hair and tell her that you need her, too.
Just about the throw in the towel on everything and this hit. So thank you.
🖤