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          Back when Pastor Christine screamed her joys at you in that huge Evangelist church, surrounded by swaying women stretching their hands to the sky and screaming praise Jesus, you thought it must be the strangest, unlikeliest thing in the world.  You don’t know why you were there or why you’re thinking about it now, but she stands there vividly, eyes to the painted ceiling.  She tilts her head up and exposes her long skinny neck.  Her dreadlocks fly back.  “God is my beacon,” she says, she screams, like she’s being burned alive.  “He shows me the way home.”

         There’s a reason you never went to church.  Too long?  Too boring?  You must have thought so as a child, stopped going when your parents did.  Their excuse was that they had no time, and yours was that you just followed them.  Your best friend’s church was the closest your ten-year-old self ever got to being saved.  “We are immortal; we will live past our bodies,” said the service, but then came the playing and the running around with good people, the laughing.  The screaming.  That was your church, and religion was nothing to you but something you didn’t understand.

         You know more about your best friend, but it flits like it’s about to be forgotten, sucked away by the standstill of the things around you, sucking backwards, yawning infinitely.  Somewhere in the mess are those things you did when you were sure you two would be together forever, sleepovers and twin birthdays, at that age when it wasn’t weird for a girl to stay over at a boy’s house.  That was before the move, before college, before life.  You have a card from him and it’s made a home on your bookshelf, right next to A Child’s Garden of Verses; a dragon adorned with gold antlers and a smile.  It says something sweet in kid-scribbles, words engulfed in flames from its mouth.

         In college, religion comes back, and it reminds you of him.  Only now you know what religion is, and you know how it’s evil and how it’s great and all the things you can’t seem to sort out in your head.  You can wonder now if there is really a you that isn’t the you that walks and talks.  Can you live without your body?  With God or without, you just want to know.  What is a soul, what is a body?  When you break your arm, does your soul break with it?  Does it change when you hear a friend giggle, when you feel the pressure of secrets in your chest, when you bite your lip at your grandfather’s funeral and cry?  Does it change when your boyfriend runs up behind you and tickles your sides, and you scream and scream until your lungs burn?

         Those questions are less important when the drinking and the partying ends and the eight-to-seven schedule starts.  They don’t like latecomers at Wells Fargo.  You still don’t fully know what a “dynamic lending officer” is, but it’s not a go-fer, and that’s starting out high up.  You get up at seven, drink yourself out of house and coffee, tell your go-fers to go for some more coffee because the office kind is free.  Still you wonder, and wonder if the thought will ever leave you, what else is there?  What are you and what is just pretending to be you?

         The answer seems clear one second and lost the next.  This is you.  This fusion of all yous former and current, your past and your present, there and gone in an instant.  But it’s not complete, and you wonder why.  Why aren’t you growing?  Where is your wedding, your Nobel Prize?  Where are your children, who have your nose and your brown eyes and your unhealthy habits, running through your green-washed suburban yard?  Where is you, old and grey and happy, looking like a watercolor swatch on a hazy blue canvas, napping in a rocking-chair in the sun with tea and a husband?

          The vacuum rushes away, comes back, up and down, and you can never tell what way is what and if there are directions and why you can feel your legs but they seem far away, miles away, like you aren’t all in one place.  A stagnant impact hits you – the vacuum is changing again, and the void flames up in your face, in your ears, in your everything.  It’s hot, and your skin is burning.  The standstill shatters, a thunderhead rolling off.  Your insides are sucked into space.  This tiny cramped infinity is echoing with something shrieking, something so dense you want to cough, and you don’t dare breathe, because these full-bodied screams are so thick and woolen that they might spill into your mouth and choke you.

          The only thing on your fingertips is tumbling chaos, and the only thing behind your eyes is fear.  There’s darkness and black smoke and pulsating heat.  You gather the little scraps of consciousness, the ones that aren’t focused on the pain or the fear or the emptiness, and hope with all your strength that Pastor Christine was right.  Let there be something beyond this spinning hell and these bright, flickering lights.  Let there be something beyond this weight-of-the-world, bearing down on you like something hungry and making you sure that there is absolutely nowhere in this life left for you to go.