High

High

         Never have I been so bitter in all my life. The way I let those people tear me down doesn’t sit well with me, but I’ll get over it someday. For now, all I can do is try and deal with the feelings of anger and betrayal that plague me everyday.
         It is bad enough that I lost my friends, “family”, and people I’ve been close to since I moved down here years ago. Now I feel like I’ve lost my God, too. In my twenty-one years on this earth, through the ups and downs of my spirituality, I have never felt this alone. At my peak, I used to worship God with all my heart and soul every hour of my life. At this moment, I can’t even think of him without a pit forming in my stomach. How could He let this happen to me?
         So now, here I sit on my front porch, listening to raindrops hit the ground. They’re so light I have to concentrate to hear them. The gentle breeze picks up my auburn hair and drops it in the same instant. The smell of marijuana intertwines with the smell of autumn rain. Although my mind is racing, I feel a peace that nowadays I can only feel when I’m high.
         I knock some ash off my joint and think back to my younger days. I take myself back six years to a time when I was an incredibly different person. I was involved in the Pentecostal church. You know, the church with the clapping and “hallelujahs!” and the rock ‘n roll worship band? Yeah, that was me. I was an emo-Christian to the extreme. My days were spent talking about our “like, totally awesome Heavenly Father.” At night I clapped and pranced around with the youth group, wondering why I hadn’t felt the “Holy Spirit” like they claimed to. Maybe I just wasn’t “full of it” like they were.
         I spent the next two years in and out of that group. I couldn’t decide if being a Pentecostal was really for me. I loved God, but the constant “God is Awesome” act those people put on everyday started to wear me out. No, I needed to find something else. Besides, high school was drawing to a close and it was time for me to start thinking about the future.
         I moved to the city two years ago, anxious to start my life all over again. In my mind, I would find my future here.
         My memory pulled me back to the present, back to my front porch…back to the raindrops. I pull a few strands of hair away from my green eyes and look up. Normally the sky would be full of stars, but the rain clouds were hiding them. I shake my head, wondering why I can’t have anything when I need it the most. I take another puff of my joint, returning back to my thoughts.
         The events that happened two years ago when I moved here made it an incredible time for me. I felt myself growing up and changing daily. I felt like I actually had control of my life, and it was a wonderful feeling.
         My newest love was for the Church. These people were different from the Pentecostals. They were quiet and more reserved. Not only that, but they seemed to have a deep love for Christ that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Their spirituality was genuine; these people inspired me and made me feel loved and complete.
         I began to reach my peak. I found myself going to the Church four to five times a week. I had met a wonderful Christian boyfriend in all of this and it seemed like I had everything I’d ever dreamed of.
         But, as is standard with me, the whole routine started to get old. My love for God did not wane, but I found myself tired of spending every waking moment with the same people. Although I loved these people, I had discovered that we had little in common besides our spiritual beliefs. I found them to be two-faced and opinionated individuals, something I had missed in my excitement when I started worshipping with them.
         I brushed this off but decided I wanted to do other things. I wanted to spend more time with my boyfriend. I wanted to enjoy college life and try other things. I loved the Church, but they had become a consuming fire that I wanted desperately to snuff out. I grew tired of letting them push me around and tried to break free. That’s when the whispers started; that’s when they started breaking my spirit.
         Slut… one word I heard a lot. That seemingly insignificant word rolls over and over in my mind. I wipe tears from my eyes as I recall this. I had never had sex. I was a virgin…but they still called me a slut. They just assumed that because I was spending so much time with my boyfriend that I was fucking him. Too much time alone together isn’t good, they’d say. You guys need to go out with other Christian couples so the temptation of having pre-marital relations will weaken. I felt like I was back in the 1800s and needed a chaperone. All the whispering started bottling up inside me until I couldn’t take it anymore.
         So what did I do? I started fucking him all the time. Granted, I wanted to do it. Now don’t think that I did it just for them. Not only did my boyfriend and I get what we wanted, but it was also kind of a big “fuck you” to the Church. Shit, let’s give them something to talk about. I don’t believe that having sex with a boyfriend for the first time makes a girl a whore, but hey, at least they’ve finally got something to go on.
         The really fun part was having sex in the church building. If they only knew all the places we’d done the deed in there, they’d have to burn the place down…
         That wasn’t the only thing they didn’t like about me. The Church could always find something. They didn’t like the way I dressed, saying it was “inappropriate for a good Christian woman” to wear t-shirts and low rise jeans. They despised my tattoos, which I never showed them but they managed to find when I wore a shirt that was “too short” (it had merely pulled up some…prompting several men in the church to come to my boyfriend and tell him I was “distracting them”). They also hated my “take-no-shit” attitude. They felt as a “good Christian woman”, I should be quiet and that my views on life were unacceptable. They constantly got onto my boyfriend, telling him to “do something about me.” They made me out to be a heathen when I was really one of the sweetest people you could meet.
         It broke my heart. Not only did it break my heart, but it hardened it as well.
         Anyway, as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months, I grew more and more unhappy in my situation. These people were making me miserable. I finally decided that I wanted out of the college group. Not only would that give me one extra night a week to myself (and to my sanity), but it would get me away from the very people who were starting to destroy me. It was a small step in the grand scheme of things, but I felt a huge burden lifted off of me.
         The college group was the worst of all the members of the Church. The ultra-conservative leader of the group had taught us to be skeptical whenever a fellow student would miss a service. We were to get onto them to make sure they didn’t have a “heart problem,” as he said so often. Whenever one person would miss, we would jump on them like a pack of wolves. My eyes started to open and I could no longer go along with this. I could no longer get spiritual high from making others feel guilty. All along I had been doing this and all along I had never noticed.
         The leader of the college group became concerned when my boyfriend and I left the group. He feared we were having “heart problems” (there’s that term again!) and wanted to make sure our faith stayed strong. He secretly believed that I was the cause of this mess…that I was bringing my boyfriend down. Why wouldn’t he? Everyone else seemed to think so. You see, the leader of the group adored my boyfriend because he had planned on going to a good Christian school to become a good Christian minister. As he too became skeptical of the church, his dream of becoming a minister slowly died away. This gave the leader a new reason to come and bother us.
         After that, our eyes started opening wider and wider. We could see things that we hadn’t seen before. By this time, concerned that I was pregnant, my boyfriend and I had eloped.
         Our first order of business as husband and wife was to get ourselves (and our possible child) out of the web we had become entangled in. This would not be easy as the members of the Church would not be willing to simply let us go. No, we would have to fight them off with a stick.
         It took a long time for them to let go. They would say that it was because they loved us and wanted the best for us, but we knew that it wasn’t us they cared about. We knew they only cared about numbers. The Church is a diminishing congregation; they don’t want to lose people they don’t have to.
         Thankfully, I was not pregnant and my husband and I could live for ourselves. This renewed our spirit. Now would not be a good time to bring a child into the world with all the strife the Church was causing us.
         After eight months of incessant phone calls and hour-long lectures from the college group leader, the visits from the ministers, and the door-knocking late at night, we were finally able to shrug them off. People we thought were our friends turned their backs on us. I think about them sometimes and send them notes and cards to let them know. I never hear anything from them and I never will. I don’t know why I bother. We also had to say goodbye to many people we loved dearly. Not all of the members of that particular Church were bad, however, they were all brainwashed. I guess for some reason they felt like they had to choose between us and the Church. We didn’t care about all that. However, the Church would make these people suffer if they chose to keep a relationship with us, so they let us go out of fear for themselves. I don’t blame them.
         Finally it all died down. The blood had stopped being shed. Everyone went on with their lives.
         My husband opens the door and steps onto the front porch. He takes the joint from me, taking a puff as he sits down next to me.
         “You’ve been out here for a while,” he says.
         “Yeah,” I reply. “I like the rain.”
         “I know,” he says quietly, looking up to see fat drops of rain dribbling from the roof. He runs his fingers through his short blonde hair, shaking his head. “Have you got something on your mind, Adrienne?”
         “I’m just thinking about the Church,” I tell him, taking a deep breath of the cool autumn air.
         He shakes his head again as he takes another drag. He puts the roach in the ash try and laughs. “What do you think they’d say if they saw us right now?” he asks sarcastically. We both know what they would say.
         “I’m sure we’re going to Hell because we smoked up tonight,” I say.
         “Tony and Adrienne are stoners,” he says sarcastically, emulating the people of the Church. He laughs and leans back. It was quiet between the two of us for a minute. “You okay?” he asks finally.
         “Yeah,” I say. He smiles at me as he makes his way back to the door.
         “Don’t stay out here too much longer,” he says as he turns the knob. “I love you.”
         I smile, my first real smile all night. “Love you, too.”
         The door closes; it was just the rain and me once again. I sit still, laying my head on my knees and rocking back and forth. The rain is slow and fat, creating a melody that calms my battered soul.
         We have come out of this mess unscathed, or so I thought. After all this, my faith in God has weakened significantly. I still believe He’s there, but I feel so lost. I’m worried I’ll never find my way.
         I feel like I’m on the right track. I guess I have to be considering the paths I’ve taken in the past have left me lost and confused. I’m still lost, but I think I’m back on the main road. That’s about all I can do for right now. I guess everything else will just have to heal up with time.
         But what about the emptiness I feel now that all this has happened? Where is my God? When I left the Church, did He leave me? I try to think of John 3:16 whenever that happens. I know it’s a cliché verse that everyone makes reference to, but it’s a good verse. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one begotten son…”
         I repeat the words over and over out loud, but I am still empty. “What do you want me to do?” I ask to seemingly nobody, anger filling my heart.
         I chuckle, standing up and taking one last look at the rain that gently hit the cement. All I need is some time. The thing is, how much time do I have left? Perhaps I’ll never figure this out.
         The one thing I do know is that it is time for bed. I will lie down and sleep in peace, I think to myself, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.
         I will sleep in peace tonight, but only because I am high.