Lettitor

Dear Reader,

Is the early morning sacred to you? Or maybe the passing thoughts you have in airplanes– things you can’t seem to write down correctly. What about the sea? Your name? The guest room? A kiddie pool baptism? A predetermined grave?

All of these things appear in the “Sacred Issue,” where these writers have created religions of their own– found gods worthy of worship in simple things like overheard conversations, recurring dreams, and microwaved dinners. They capture the open-ended nature of the sacred and use the idea to piece together their own ways of finding beauty and carrying on. After all, sacredness isn’t determined by a religion or set of rules, but by the people who choose to make something more than it is. In this issue, writers locate the sacred in the intertwining connections between the everyday-ness of our human lives, the past, and the dead– ancestors, strangers, lovers, old friends, unknown namesakes.

The sacred is not just a way to delude ourselves out of harsh realities, to cheat a way out of grieving. Rather, sacred moments help these authors sink deeply into a life that is both permeated with the blessed and is also a cataract of the banal. Here, these authors bear witness to burial rituals, bloody omens, self-conscious prayers, returning home, growing up, loss, and the sun. What is sacred often depends on the morning, and how you choose to write about it.

In a world that often appears anything but blessed, we ask you to think about sacredness; we offer you images and stories to help conjure it for yourself. Bleary eyed Rastall’s brunches, a rainy February, the view from the fourth floor of the library, your walk to class in the morning. You may be surprised with what you find.

– The Cipher Staff

To My Name Holders

A letter to an unknown namesake.

Article by Anonymous Art by Isabella Hageman

To my name holders, 

My mom knows everyone. She recognizes the cashier at our local Wegmans: Gilad, a sophomore at the local university my older brother never should have gone to. She speaks of the new neighbors across the street, the ones whose names elude her memory, in defiance of the imposing wooden sign that swings from the once graceful maple tree that wastes away in their front yard. She’s acquainted with the maple tree in their front yard, whose leaves were once a melody of hues reminiscent of rich soil and burnt eggplant. They now slouch from the weight of bearing the swooping and almost eligible letters of their last name that she will never bother to read. She’s aware of every customer service representative she has ever talked to, the ones who apologize incessantly to the personable lady on the other line who spells her name through an orchestrated list of objects she is dedicated to acting out in every call— “it’s p like pen, a like apple, and m like maple.” She’s pictured the friends I speak about at school, the daily characters in my life that have replaced her and my family while I live states away. She recalls my sister’s boss, Albert, whose name she swears ages him— he’s only thirty. She is conscious of the fact that my sister thinks she will rot away by thirty. I guess what I'm trying to ask is if it’s silly to wish that she would have known the men whose names I bear. And what is it about you, particularly, that is unknowable? 

I sat in class today for the majority of the time I was supposed to be writing, unsure if you counted as an ancestor, or one who I could stake claim on at least. I mean, we aren’t related. For one, I’m pretty sure, as I bear many of the same personality characteristics as my father, that you aren’t even aware of my existence on this earth. I say that as an admittance of sorts that I too like to let things just be without explanation. Usually, I do this under the guise that whatever I am omitting sounds more poetic without explanation. I like when my words aren’t ravaged like the carnage that was the poor texts I used to butcher in AP Lang. You should know that I hate rhetorical analysis and I am long-winded to a fault. Two things my English teacher in high school hated about me before you would ever know me.  

I’ve always been curious why out of four kids my dad named me and not the rest. My sister is named Frances after my mother’s mom who passed away when she was around my age, which feels significant. My older brother is named Jack, which my mom likes to tell me is because she has never met a Jack she didn’t like. My other brother Max wears the sacred name she saved for when she had kids. And my name is Mattie. It may ring a bell because it is the feminine extension of yours, which I am told is not a coincidence. I know nothing of you. My mother has never met you, but alas, here I am carrying a name our family has no claim to. One of the few details I do know is that you may have been from Texas and that you played the guitar; asking my dad any more feels invasive because I have a feeling that you come from a time he has no desire to relive. Heck, I just learned a few years ago that he was born in Chicago, not Rochester as I had assumed. How the fuck did I not know where he was from? 

The question is where would I start with my questions for you? The status of your life I am not too sure of. It’s strange to think that someone is roaming around within reach who bears the same name as me. I guess I would ask, why do you think I was named after you and what was my father like? I cannot imagine it. I think the touchstones of his personality would remain true, but I am unsure how they would have been expressed. It’s only fair that you are allowed to ask questions as well, which I’ll have to take my best swing at. I guess I would want to tell you that my favorite song is Sunday Morning by Johnny Cash because from what little I know about you, I feel like you would smirk at that. Are you the reason my dad hates country music? For some reason, the age that I picture you is around the age I am now because this is the time I would’ve assumed y’all would’ve been together. I imagine you being a bit rough around the edges with an appearance that showcases that you have worked a lot of hard days in your life. Leathery skin, a toothy grin, and some sort of sloppy haircut. Probably met in the military, Idk. Words taken straight from my mother’s mouth, “I know he was a Navy guy.” She has the zip codes of upstate New York memorized from her stint at the post office, but when it comes to you, you might have been in the Navy.

My dad keeps a standing wardrobe in the basement. It's tall like the one I had in my dorm freshman year. A muddy brown color with the emblem of Hard Rock Café in the top right corner. I wonder if that has any connection to his Hard Rock Café pin collection, which he tried to give me a few years back, but I returned it because it felt too much. There were pins from every place he traveled around the globe. There must have been hundreds, and I pushed them back with a comment on how he should display them for himself. Wrong answer. 

The wardrobe is locked; however, it has the key sticking out as if to say, “open me,” which I have. Inside are old uniforms, which I suppose are his, and artifacts of his past that are so caked with dust I had to take a time out after a quick glance. At the time, I was incapable of placing the uniforms but now I have reason to believe they were from the Navy. Was he in the Navy with you? It's weird to think you would've seen him in these. I took his belt from the wardrobe. He technically gave it to me one day when I was searching for one. When my mother saw the black looped belt, she told me to be careful with it because the random numbers inscribed on the underbelly of the belt were some sort of identity marker for my dad, like a social. I wore it to middle school most days.  

When I see you, the location is somewhere abroad. Somewhere dark. Somewhere he wishes never to return to.  

If it makes you feel better, the only thing I know about Luigi from my mother is that “he was very Italian, apparently, and had chickens I think in the basement.” I’m getting a headache from all the ways I could interpret that; I am not sure which one of you is more of an enigma to me. The only thing Luigi has on you is that I dressed up as him for Halloween as a joke with my best friend from high school. She was Mario and I, Luigi. I can’t remember if that made my dad laugh or not. Luigi is the reason my middle name is “Lou” instead of “Luna” or “Lee,” which are both family names. 

Anywho, I hope this finds you well, and well...not dead.

--Mattie 

Between Aerobic and Anaerobic Decomposition

Article and Art by Willa Schendler

On the plane home, I took a double dose of generic nighttime cold medicine. In the foggy thirty minutes before I was knocked unconscious, I overheard Clint and Jackie talking to the flight attendant. She was not the head flight attendant even though she appeared to be in her late sixties– coarse dyed platinum hair, better makeup than I know how to do, though too heavy on the blush and eyeliner. To compensate for her lack of power, she picked favorite passengers, treated them with the saccharine charm of diner waitresses who call you hon but seem to mean it. 

I always go running on the same loop. I enjoy observing the changes in the conditions of the porta-potties and side-trail detritus (shooter bottles, soda cans, orphaned gloves, and once– I think– meth, exchanging hands in a small blue baggie). I have always felt that I have to be still somewhere for a long time before I arrive. Before I notice beauty, I need to loop through sameness for years. During my last run, it was so cold that the community compost pile– where people dump unwanted things, Christmas trees, raked leaves– steamed vapor into the violet southwest sky. 

7/4/23

Things to look forward to: 

• Telling Morgan about June 

• Cooking dinner

• Evening walks 

Clint and Jackie recognized the flight attendant. Is it possible she was their flight attendant from two Thanksgivings ago, on an overnight flight from Berlin back to Dallas? Clint and Jackie, sitting in aisle seats across from each other, bonded over this unlikely reunion in the back of economy near the bathrooms with the flight attendant in between them, resting her hands on the overhead compartments, leaning forwards so I was positioned directly under her raised arm. “Do you remember us?” Yes, of course she did. Though that was a lie. 

11/12/23

November Sun, before trip…so happy. 

On my run this fall, I saw an upright vacuum cleaner on the side of the trail, artfully nestled between the overgrown weeds creeping onto the pavement which were wafting the licorice bite of yellow yarrow over my ankles. The vacuum cleaner appeared a thing of natural beauty, not unlike the porcupine I stumbled upon deep in the Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness last summer. I rounded a corner of a thick pine forest, and before my adrenaline-firing brain could identify the strange animal with black, glossy eyes (a porcupine!) the thing hobbled off, unbothered, shaking its white tipped needles as it disappeared. 

6/29/23

Old Mombasa City. Jahazi Coffee in the rain. Red and orange patterned tablecloths, black and white tiles, narrow alley. Coffee has cinnamon and cardamom. The rain clouds have darkened the alley, and now the cafe is glowing with the reflected yellow light off the ancient building walls. 

I felt bad writing down the details of Clint and Jackie’s life. But. They are both divorced with children, alternately spending the Thanksgiving holiday with their own kids and each other. They can travel extravagantly every two years, getting out of Texas, no tether of familial obligations. They have seen, in their words, all the great places, all the things you should see. In two years they are doing a Caribbean cruise. In four years, a guided tour of Venice. I was grateful for the distraction from the strange realization of the permanence of missing people, or the impermanence of a short visit to a new place. 

My favorite part of my run is along a chain link fence topped with six inches of barbed wire, protecting an endless sprawl of industrial materials from my interference. Bobcats, two-by-fours, aluminum pipes, tractors, buckets of nails, shovels, buses. Beyond the industrial graveyard, silhouetted by the spikes of the barbed wire, I can see the satellites peeking out of the top of Cheyenne Mountain North American Aerospace Defense Command. 

1/26/24

I am working in a cafe, and I have by chance run into a friend and my favorite professor. A middle aged woman next to me is sipping a large glass of white wine and journaling intently. There is a kid at the table across from me drinking apple juice and reading a comic book while his dad reads next to him. Walking through a brick alley on my way home, I am struck, momentarily, by the beauty of the blue sky against the red stone and the narrowness of the alley that seems to be more a portal than a street. 

The flight attendant joked with Clint and Jackie that the damn planes just keep getting smaller, so it wasn’t their fault they needed seatbelt extenders. I wondered if Clint and Jackie felt embarrassed that their request for seat belt extenders had now become public conversation on the packed flight, but they did not seem to mind, and instead the conversation leaned towards the general deterioration of American society, where things like paychecks and airplane seats are smaller and shittier than they used to be. 

The flight attendant explained that she started working more exhausting overnight international flights so she could afford a pool at her house in Florida. But now that she has the pool, she’s got to work even more to pay it off, so she doesn’t have time to swim. Is the travel part of her job nice, at least? No, the flight attendant remarks. She arrives in a hotel at midnight– and they’re all the same, anywhere you go– and leaves by dawn, never seeing a place by the light. 

11/19/23

Some of the mausoleums in the Recoleta Cemetery have glass windows where you can see green growth clawing against the glass, steaming, growing out of human decay. 

My run goes along the train tracks, too. The train transports whole tanks and military airplane parts. Sometimes, the train passes by, hauling inky pieces of coal in railcars covered with blocky neon graffiti. Thom Hartmann calls coal “the last hours of ancient sunlight”– the photosynthesis of long dead plants and the cellular respiration of decayed animals converted, at last, to light. My dad told me this once, as he stuck a melon-size ball of coal from a mine near our town into our wood stove and we watched it burn for hours. I watch the ancient sunlight spill out of the train against the golden mountains. Sun and light and cold and steam are what matter in this pre-apocalypse, if we could call it that. 

The Old Man and the Palace

Building connection, stone by stone, in the streets of Buenos Aires.

Article by Will Garrett Art by Aiden Ingenthron

A plate of frozen fish and mashed potatoes is carried by a waddling old man toward the microwave. He shuffles forward in a bent posture like an emperor penguin walking against the wind. As he moves the plate to its destination, he loses balance and makes a racket against the inside of the microwave walls. He curses in Spanish, but after closer inspection, he shrugs, since the frozen food had stuck to its exact place. He wheezes and grips the kitchen counter as the old microwave hums away.

I begin shuffling papers at the dining room table to make my presence known. He whips his head up in surprise.

“Hola Jorge,” I say coolly, trying to diffuse his alarmed state.

“Ahh– Willy– ¡Hola!”

The alarm on the microwave beeps and I jump up and awkwardly ask if I can help. Jorge kindly shakes his head as he carries our food to the table, the steam rising in large plumes.

The smell of microwaved fish and mashed potatoes smells as it has always smelled. We sit in silence for a while and then Jorge takes hold of the conversation, his eyes blueing over accounts of the Napoleonic war.

As the dry fish struggles it way to my mouth, I remind myself to bite, breathe, then swallow. Or, maybe swallow, breathe, then bite. I wonder how many different orders of these three actions are possible. After attempting five different combinations, I eventually land on the sixth and final, which is swallow, bite, then breathe, bringing Jorge’s conversation about the Napoleonic wars to an abrupt end. I try to answer, but my mouth is still wide open with food. Crumbs of fried fish fall from my mouth.

“Lo siento, Jorge,” I apologize, shaking my head.

I try to communicate my thought experiment to him in broken Spanish, but am unsuccessful. He looks at me a bit worriedly as I continue stuttering. He finally interjects by pointing out my poor acquisition of Spanish. I heartily agree with him.

Jorge wraps up the Napoleonic War and shoots into the Algerian War. I register his words in random increments as I watch clumps of fried fish stick to his gums and teeth.

“Willy, do you understand?” he asks in Spanish.

I shake my head. Eventually, I finish my plate and go to my room, plopping on my bedcover and pillow.

I don’t move for a long time, even though my bed feels short and stiff and full of cockroaches. Realistically, my bed has only housed one cockroach, which Jorge had grabbed by the abdomen and flung casually at the wall like it was dart practice.

“Lo siento, Willy,” he had said. He was embarrassed because he was convinced that this never happened in California. I laughed in agreement.

I envy the courage of a man that is able to grab a cockroach with his bare hands. I am keeping this as food for thought as I lie helplessly on my bed. I haven't moved for what seems like hours. I whip my head around and yank off the sheets. Taking a few deep breaths, I pop in earplugs and the noises fade out as they expand. The room gets warmer and has a low ringing, which feels calming and pleasant, but the ringing intensifies and it transforms into a rattling noise, a sound like a metal tambourine covered in low hanging beads, and it's right next to my head. I squirm around, freaking out, and yank the earplugs out. The scheduled noises of late night traffic and TV programs return.

In four hours I’m awake and craving any type of distraction, so I ask Jorge if he has any books on hand that I could read. He smiles and, without responding, waddles back to his office and returns with an old copy of “War and Peace.” Its bulky pages are bent in a U at the spine and are missing their cover. From a distance, it looks like a dusty accordion.

Within hours, I’m obsessed with a character named Pierre Bezukhov. After studying abroad, he returns to his dying father to inherit ridiculous amounts of money, but soon becomes lonely and disillusioned. Not knowing who to trust, he joins a Freemasonry lodge. He quickly learns an important takeaway from the fundamentals of Freemasonry, to which Tolstoy writes:

“No one can attain to the truth by himself; only stone by stone, with the participation of all, over millions of generations, from our forefather Adam down to our time, is the temple being built which is to become a worthy dwelling place for the great God.”

I snap the book shut with a thwap and look up at Jorge, who sits at the dining room table. He doesn’t seem to notice the sound. I try to catch his attention.

“Jorge, voy a ir a... what’s the word?” I stutter, doing my best to speak in Spanish.

“Willy, it’s okay, you can use the English,” Jorge replies in English. “What do you like?”

“No, Jorge, yo prefiero el Spanish,” I say, determined to keep trying. “What’s the word I was thinking of – palacio! Voy a ir a la Barolo Palacio!”

“¿Qué?”

I switch back to English. “It's a building that used to be the tallest building in South America. You know, Palacio Barolo?”

“Ohh,” Jorge replies. “Why would you want to go there? That building is boring as shit. It's full of offices and has no history.”

“No sé Jorge...”

“It's just a tourist trap for Americans like you. Pero bueno. What can you do? You can go to the building if you want.”

“Gracias, Jorge. But did you know that Palacio Barolo was built by Freemasons, you know, that cult?” I stutter, feeling the need to justify my adventure. “Anyways, I really like the book you gave me. Do you remember reading about Pierre?”

“No, I never read the book, since I already know the history. He dies in the end.”

“Ah.” A moment of silence. “Well, I’ll let you know what I think of the building.”

“Okay Willy!” He exclaims cheerfully, his blueing eyes looking distant.

I meet my American friend, David, and we take the bus. I refrain from sharing Jorge’s preemptive review of our destination. We get off on Avenida de Mayo and have some trouble finding the palace, since the street has countless historical buildings. We finally spot our palace near the street corner, with a hundred balconies peeking out in Gothic style.

We get our tickets inside Barolo and I start gazing at the walls, thinking about Jorge, feeling like I can’t connect with him, about how he has the shape of a giant toad and how well that look compliments his young hearted spirit, and his inability to filter his own thoughts. Months of living with him is weighing down on me, adding up, stone after stone...

“Power thoughts?” David asks, eyeing me curiously.

“No, I was just thinking... You know how I said I was reading that book?”

“You’re such an English major.”

“Yeah...”

“Well, what is it?” “Jorge spoiled part of it for me.”

“Is that something I should be worried about? Are you going to be okay?” David asks, half sarcastically. After two straight months of hanging out with each other daily, he’s still slightly cautious about my range of sensitivity, which probably says more about me than him.

“Well, yeah, I think so,” I sigh, gazing longingly at a line of floor tiles in a chain linked shape. “Funny how a single book can provide such a big sense of security.”

David rolls his eyes. “I only read when I’m bored.”

“Then you must read a lot, seeing that you’ve spent most of your life on a corn farm in the middle of Pennsylvania.”

“The Amish people have always kept me company,” David replies in all truth.

Suddenly a short, peppy Italian man appears under the arch of the hallway. He introduces himself as Donny, our tour guide. His tight jeans and greased look stand out next to David’s baggy plaid shirt and long blond hair. All the tourists form a circle around Donny. One couple that is nearest to him are practically white knuckling their grip on each other's hands, looking wide-eyed and attentive.

Donny welcomes everyone into the circle and then quickly kicks off the tour as if he has a tight schedule.

“This building, Palacio Barolo, used to be the tallest in South America.”

“I already knew that,” I whisper to David. His eyes glaze over.

“This palace was built by the Freemasons. Both the developer and architect were Italian masons and they modeled it after Dante’s Divine Comedy. Right now, we are on the first floor: Hell.”

The circle of tourists around us gasps.

“The building was eventually owned by a man that was rather antisocial. Since the building was inhabited by many renters, he installed secret elevators so that he could move up and down the floors without being bothered. A kind and strange man, he wished to share his domain with people that never knew he existed. Knowing that they were present was enough for him. He stayed on the parameters like an archangel. Now, who wants to go to heaven? It’s only 22 more floors.”

A couple tourists laugh.

“¡Vámonos! Let's go.”

We all line up to take an ancient iron elevator that has an arrow over the frame of its door which points at the yellowing floor numbers like a semi-circular clock. As everyone shuffles forward, it's obvious that there won’t be enough space, so David immediately jumps out of line, forward, it's obvious that there won’t be enough space, so David immediately jumps out of line, and in association, I do too. The guide tells us to wait for the elevator to come back as they slowly creep upwards, leaving David and I on the first floor.

“Why do you always do that?” I whisper to David, even though there is no one around us. I sound less accusatory than curious.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re always giving leeway to other random people we don’t know, and then you get us stuck down here, in hell. Why?”

David rolls his eyes. “Because I’m not an asshole.”

“Yeah, I know you're not an asshole, that’s obvious. We had a spot in line and then you jumped out... Did you do it because you want to avoid feeling like an asshole?”

“No, it's because I care about other people. That’s all.”

“So there’s no other reason, other than your spotless soul and your profound care for others? That’s bullshit. You had incentive to do it, you didn’t want to look like an asshole. Everyone has incentive to be altruistic,” I say, hearing my voice echo. David doesn’t respond so I continue. “It's an evolutionary trait. Like, if I help you, I know that you will feel obligated to help me, which creates a network of security. That’s what being human is.”

“Just because you think that way doesn’t mean I do,” David replies. “If I want to offer myself up to other people, that’s my own decision. My way of decision making doesn’t have to be applied and compared to every other human that ever lived on this earth. If I open the door for people behind me, if I offer strangers my cigarettes, it's not because I think they will return the favor, but because I genuinely want to connect with them.”

Ding. The elevator arrives and David makes a scene about opening the door for me. He smiles.

“That doesn’t count!” I hiss, pointing at the door. “That was just to prove a point. And who says those other instances you mentioned weren't just to prove a point? I mean, if you can easily think back to times that you have gone out of your way for strangers, don’t you think that it could be to have some sort of internal leverage, that says ‘I am a good person?’ Like some type of internal narcissistic bragging rights? And maybe they don’t have to come out in conversation, but you have these altruistic instances just floating there on the surface of your mind for distraction.”

“Look man... I’m trying to think back clearly to the last time I did something altruistic– and the elevator doesn’t count! Because it just happened... And I can’t, no.”

“That’s a lie. Remember when you offered your last cigarette to that one homeless guy at the park?” “Well, I do now. What, did you store that memory just for this argument?” David laughs.

“No...”

From inside the elevator, still moving slowly, the arrow passes over the 11th floor.

“I just don’t get it. Why do you feel the need to argue about this?”

“Because... I don’t know, maybe it's because I think Jorge is housing me, and feeding me, meal after meal, the same food over and over again, and letting me stay in his house, and doing all these things for me, just because he doesn’t want me to go running to our program counselors and telling them that Jorge’s incapable of housing people. Which he isn't! But there’s such a lack of connection between us. I can’t understand him, which he knows, but he just continues to lecture me about history, like a parent playing KQED on the TV for a baby and hoping that they turn out smart in ten years. Which now that I think of it, is kind of sweet.”

“It seems like you're on his side, you keep backing him up. I think you know he’s doing it all out of the good of his heart.”

“True, he did let me borrow War and Peace...”

Ding.

The latticed iron door is pulled aside to our smiling tour guide. “Welcome to heaven!”

“Thank you, Donny.”

“Yeah, thanks Donny.”

The circle of tourists at the end of the hallway all look elated, whispering things like, “Heaven! My daughter told me I’d never make it here.” And, “Where are the 72 virgins?” each comment receiving an equal amount of waxed laughter.

The hallway itself is unimpressive, with very little window space and a few offices at the other end. We are told by Donny that this isn’t actually the top yet, and that we need to climb a very cramped staircase to arrive at the pearly gates. If you’re claustrophobic, tough luck.

One lady stood at the mouth of the stairway just shaking her head. I shuffled forward, trying not to look back at her out of respect.

David and I are the last in line again as we scuttle up the spiral staircase on all fours. At the top of the staircase is a hole, which we crawl out of like insects in a line, opening up to a glass dome in the sky with seat cushions facing all directions. Plopping down next to David, I’m panting, eyes wide, looking out over the skyline of Buenos Aires and past the coastline, past the horizon and over the ocean to the tip of Uruguay.

David brushes his blonde hair back angelically.

“You are now at the top of what used to be the tallest building in South America,” Donny explains in an animated voice. “It was also a lighthouse for commercial ships to navigate the coastline of Buenos Aires, however, its light wasn’t bright enough to extend all the way out to the ocean, so ships would sometimes get lost at night. Feel free to take pictures!”

After several oohs and ahhs we shuffle back down into the abyss of the tiny stairwell. I’m listening to the echoes of the steps and the collectively concentrated silence of avoiding a fall.

I follow behind David, trying not to kick him in the head. “Step after step, this building was constructed for the loneliest man in the world,” I relay over to him. Receiving no reply, I continue. “Stone after stone, we build palaces for gods.”

“What? I can’t hear you,” he shouts into the descending mass of people, his voice bouncing off the walls. The staircase winds around 180 degrees and I lose sight of him.

We reach an elevator and take it down to floor seven, which is purgatory, since it's right in between floors one and fourteen. We are offered free crackers and wine. Unsure of what my Catholic mother would think, I gratefully decline the offerings.

Back on Avenida de Mayo, we walk past fast-speaking Argentines and squealing oncoming buses, and David’s in a great mood, telling me about his ghost stories. As a man of the natural sciences, he has an unlikely knack for bullshit.

“And that was the rocking chair in my basement speaking to my girlfriend again. She’s a spiritual medium, which has its gifts and curses. The chair was telling her that its name was Gladys, which, coincidentally, is my great-grandmother's name... but there's no way my girlfriend would've known that because I’d never mentioned my great-grandmother to her, and neither had my parents or my brother. Anyways, the next night, I lost my elf doll that I’d kept on my desk since I was young. It was lost for weeks and then it randomly turned up on that rocking chair.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“So what, you won’t even endorse my story, but you're so quick to endorse some freemason spiritual beliefs from a random old book?”

“That random old book is actually Tolstoy, and I thought that you didn’t hear half of that stuff I was saying on the stairwell?”

“Selective hearing.”

Exactly. See, we just go tit for tat. Our friendship is just a reciprocal spilling of– and an ignoring of– each other's bullshit.”

“And a creation of bullshit.”

“No, that’s only your job,” I chirp.

He pauses. “What I think is bullshit is all the kids in our study abroad program who don’t do anything, don’t go outside, and just slander their host parents, blaming them for ruining their stay. It's so boring to hear that kind of stuff.”

Remembering we had had a similar conversation earlier about a spoiled girl that compared her host mom to some sort of evil witch, I now feel guilty for my obnoxious ramblings about Jorge.

I answer, “It’s odd, I feel like the people in our program that have trouble connecting with their host parents are lacking not only from the language barrier, but also because the host parents are all so old. They’re like all in their 70’s and 80’s, and I think that housing anyone at that age is always tough, whether or not the student is independent.

I think that most of these old men and women housing us are overwhelmed and it causes them to stick to very repetitive behaviors because they’re often forgetful...”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David sighs.

“Jorge.”

“Oh. Splendid.”

“And I think that getting caught in someone else's routine can be discombobulating, especially when they’re older and have different values and needs, all the while you’re trying to establish your own routine from the ground up in an entirely new country. Every meal I’m seated to–”

“Fried fish and mashed potatoes, and sometimes empanadas, I know,” David interjects.

“Right, and I guess it's Jorge’s own way of saying, I love and care about you, which he does, I think, even if we don’t understand each other. But I think that between us, there’s a level of respect and understanding in that, morning after evening after night we check in with the same few words and with the same old food, and it's like we are slowly building, stone after stone, something between us that we can worship.”

“I like that,” David echoes. “Everyday, I go back to my host mom’s apartment and her small, white dog starts barking when I’m just down the hallway, and then it keeps barking when I’m inside and biting at my feet, and it keeps barking when I’m in my room, and when I’m sitting down for dinner. There’s something comforting about that terrible routine. You know, when my host mom’s dog was finally neutered because of the complaints from the neighbors, it felt weird to step out of that elevator door on our floor and never hear the barks from the hallway again. I didn’t give a shit about how the dog felt to be neutered though, with its dumb little whimpers, that thing can die in hell.”

“Infernal repetitions are what construct relationships. I wonder, do you think that we’ve built a whole life here? Like we’ve had enough time to really sink our feet in the mud?”

“I don’t know...”

“I’d never live here full time because I’ll never be able to speak Spanish. But I feel like what we’ve built here so far is... is...”

“A couple stories and some dying old folks that we’ll never forget.”

We are interrupted by a squealing bus, which takes us back to our neighborhood. I say goodbye to David. When I get inside my apartment, I go straight to Jorge to tell him all about our adventure. I make sure to include every detail. Jorge is excited that I have so much to say and he listens intently. When I’m finished, he smiles and grabs me by the shoulder.

“Well done, Willy. I’m glad you like it.”

Green Cathedral

Article by Kanitta Cheah Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

There is a house in my mind. It’s unclear if I am the house or if the world is the house, but there is a house in my mind and it never ends. I dream in the rooms of this house. I told you about it once and you wanted to know more, so I said: I used to wonder how I knew all my dreams took place here because I could not recognize any one room, and I could not describe any exterior at all. I know that somewhere inside there is a forest, and inside the forest there is a cathedral. I have seen vast wooden ballrooms, with skateboard decks as decor; shallow linoleum hallways with evidence of flooding; piles and piles of unidentifiable junk in twisted rooms with no visible walls; marbled waterslides in rocky caverns through some kind of museum; and only once, a porch, a wooden-columned landing directly on the open ocean. And still, I know. It is all the same house. Unless my dreams do not all occur in the same mind. How many other rooms are there inside? What is there left to discover, to uncover? Hello, hello, is there anyone else there? If there are no answers then why be curious at all? I think about running through the house and tearing down the walls; if I don’t find answers maybe it will stop the questions. But I don’t think the house would like that very much. Some things are better left alone. (Am I better left alone?) The thought makes me scream. 

Earthshattered, I have to run: across holy water and blessed pines, no solid ground to be found, I recall the green cathedral, the shadowed forest shrine, its arms of clouds and cedar twisting into something I could call an archway. A secret room I’ve never dreamed of, a hollow chamber in the heart of the house, a place whose walls sing with the voices of sacred stones, a song I could neither replicate nor recall.

In my dear green cathedral, the wind sometimes blew with such strength that it took my breath away; my body was shocked by the world saying here, it’s been too long, honey, take what you need from me. It was only air, but I could not breathe it in. I tried to inhale and my body sang with the voices of sacred bones.

I want to die having laughed so loud and smiled so big that evidence of my joy lingers in the lines on my face. I want to die having known I’ve smiled a smile so secret that only one other could recognize it as their own. I want to die knowing my name was safe in your mouth. I hope you know yours is safe in mine. 

If I could be a space so blessed as to hold your being, then I think I would be able to take a breath and smile a secret smile. Would you share it with me? 

In my dear green cathedral, there was a flowered seat. I have sat down in this chair and cried. (I cry easily these days.) Am I crazy to think the cathedral cried with me? From the faraway arches, foggy cedars, and firs flung water on my head, cold, crisp. Every time I come to the cathedral I wonder if I’ve been here before. I know I have. It feels the same but it always looks different, and sometimes it doesn’t “look” at all.

Only in waking have I felt it, the aching for another presence. Maybe that’s why the house shapeshifts when I sleep. It is trying to become the world, trying to become a companion, trying to become a memory, trying to fill a hole in my heart, to sit on the throne of flowers of its own creation. This is not how I was meant to grow. Is this not how I was meant to grow? Underground, I’ve been hiding, sucking water off of roots, living on scraps, and the cathedral has become moldy, mildewy – but it maintains its motherly barrier between me and the sky. 

I am still sacred. I am still scared. And I suppose this is what I needed all along, for someone like you to love me for being sacred, to love me for being scared. To love the mind and body, to love the house and the cathedral, and all its residents. To sit down and rest in a flowered seat and find that it is home. Before I fall asleep, I like to dream in the evening, when the stars light its arches. If I were a cathedral, then you could take a step into me and know that something special had occurred within me. The chaos of the surrounding house doesn’t bother you. The way I cry on your throne makes you hold me. You were made to sit here and I was made to hold you.

Aumakua

Article by Pumehana Holmes Art by Isabella Hageman

My aumakua passed me today

In a way I could not ignore

I laid down on the beach

Freeing my skin to the sun

I let my body rest on the sand

Let the sand cradle me

The way a mother does a babe

As she sleeps

I close my eyes

And hear a lullaby of waves

Hear the wind pick up

Let the rain bounce against skin, seep in,

And keep me cool

“You know, grandma always says our aumakua is the honu.”

“I know, you’ve told me this before.”

“She's adamant.”

“I know.”

My cousin gives me that look. The one deepened by history set before us by our mothers. The ones we laid in, closed our eyes and listened to the beats of their hearts. The look that tells me she knows my history, acknowledges it, but pushes for more.

She continues to drive, I continue to look out of the window, and we talk about different things. It’s a familiar loop, one cultivated by growing into people together. Growing into friends, into strangers, into friends again. Always family.

“So, what are you going to tell him? The tattoo artist?”

I’ve done this talk before. Alone. Raved to mirrors where I looked at myself, enjoying where my hair and lips curled, where my brows laid emphatically. How I could simply exist by myself in my room. I had practiced what I wanted to say, lips wet and eager, like the first time I kissed him in his studio. His eyes teasing, my heart bold. My lips are chapped, my tongue dry. I swallow. Furrow my brows and huff.

“I don’t know,” I say but do not believe.

I had pondered this before, ranted to friends in the pockets of their cars in the dead of night. Had whispered small notes into my books, the ink seeping with my enthusiasm.

“I’ll tell them about my parents. How they’re Deaf. How I’m CODA. How they met,”

I say but the words feel strange. I had never said this before when I practiced in my room. Not like this. Perhaps because I felt pressured. Perhaps because a younger part of me felt the need to conform, to perform, even to her.

She isn’t satisfied but I continue regardless, stumbling on fragments of identity I’ve poured into scholarship essays of how I’m diverse and special. One of a kind. The type to bring “aloha” to their communities. A scheme. A way to conform, to wrap myself around a stereotype I no longer believe.

The words grip my mouth, yank paragraphs through my bared teeth, my throat bland. What I’m saying does not match what I mean, but I say the words nonetheless.

My cousin pauses. Glances over at me in a studied way. It’s a look filled with knowledge, with knowing, even when she thinks otherwise. Our relationship has changed in strange ways. Sometimes strained and other times closer than ever.

She purses her lips. They’re glossy, covered in the balm she keeps herself prepped with. Her image, a careful thing. 

She is the kind of beautiful you breathe in. The kind you do not question but know. The kind of beauty you see in a landscape and nod at. At how the land simply makes sense. 

She is simply beautiful.

“What about a storyteller?” she says. 

And I feel dumb. She has the kind of intelligence that seeps into the air. Fills it.

“What about talking about your struggle in embracing being Hawaiian?”

I think of course! I’ve said these things before, practiced them in mirrors, alone in my room. I tell her this because I cannot keep the words in. They bubble out like magma.

I agree with her, but I do not tell her that she has seen me. Has listened to me in such a way, that I believe through our mothers’ mother’s heart, she heard and saw me. Before we were born, she felt me and gripped on, and in a breath saw me in the mirror, practicing what I wanted to say. How I wanted to tell my story.

I do not tell her that in a second, I saw her in the glass made from the sand we laid on to tan. That in a second, she was cradling my soul in such delicacy that I was frozen. To know that someone has seen me how I saw myself even through my doubt and insecurity. That she has seen me after all these years.

Perhaps it was the growing done simultaneously. The ways in which we molded and conformed to each other until we sprouted apart, like roots in the dirt, in the mountains we call home. Maybe it is because we see each other through our pain that we see each other so vibrantly. I had seen her for years through the glass but had not realized there was a pair of eyes looking back.

She continues to drive. I continue to look at mountains. We continue to the beach.

Kin lay on the sand

Similar hearts beat to the crash of waves

“You know I only said those things because I was jealous.”

“Hm?”

I know what she is referring to.

“You being haole.”

“Mm.”

My cousin loves me. I know this, don’t doubt this, it is one of the few familial connections I am sure of.

“You used to call me haole a lot growing up.”

“I know.”

My cousin has always loved my lashes. My hair. My eyes. Features I inherited from my dad. She has always told me this. I have always known this.

She looks at me and I look back

I nod. She does too.

We breathe together and understand

“Are you ready to go in the water?” I pull the straps up my arm: failed attempts at masking my London tan.

Us kin, we swim

Our bodies floating with the ocean

One.

Our ancestors were voyagers

They searched for new homes across the sea

My cousin stills. “Puma,” she says, looking straight past me.

“There’s a seal behind you.” She turns around and swims. I turn. I see its head, how its eyes lock on mine. For a second, it is peaceful, then I turn to a splash.

I follow my cousin like a breeze, sharp. When we look back, out of the water and drenched, we see the monk seal swim along the shore, grazing past people in hesitant glances. A failed attempt at sunbathing.

My cousin and I lay in the sand and let the waves crash like we did when we were young. For a second, we negate gravity and time. For a second, we are eight and eleven. Our eyes are wide, locked onto each other.

“Puma,” she mutters softly.

“There was a monk seal right behind you.”

“I know, I got scared that I was too close.”

“You were close, Puma.”

“I know.”

We spend a few seconds looking at each other in wonder. Eight and eleven. Twenty-one and twenty-four. We lay together in the sun, searching waves, watching for a sign of the seal long lost. I google Hawaiian Monk Seals, and what they mean.

Guardians, Google says, of departed souls. For a second, I worry someone has died. That this is how I find out. This freaks me out. My cousin clarifies they must be Hawaiian. Crisis averted. I let myself tan again.

“Puma,” my cousin says urgently, a common trend of the day I suppose. I dart up, what one does when such a tone is inspired in one’s vocal cords.

“Turtles.”

“Huh?” I pull my straps over my shoulder, one at an embarrassingly useless (tan-wise) but so utterly needed (breast-wise) strap at a time. She points. I look and look and look.

She points again. I glance at her confused but look, and look, and look.

She gets exasperated so I look, less urgently, but look, looking away, away from my cousin’s growing delusion until I finally see it. This green spry thing pops up in the water and stares directly at me. It was then the sea’s declaration of war began, which I would soon learn when I visited the beach again only to be destroyed by the tides. But that’s another story.

“I see it!”

My cousin looks at me with that look one gives when they were right and were being gaslit to believe otherwise. I look at the turtle. Touché.

“You know, Grandma said our Aumakua is the honu.”

“I know,” I say because I didn’t forget.

She gives me a look.

“Puma, I don’t think you understand. They’re our Aumakua. Our ancestors.”

I nod. She gives me a look. We grow closer by the second. We lay back into her towel under the umbrella we just bought. My cousin looks out to the waves.

“Puma.”

I spring up immediately, straps abandoned, modesty ignored. It’s a shark. It must be a shark. It can’t not be a shark.

“Another turtle.” I dart my eyes, glazed for a chance of green. Eyes grasping for a hint of honu. Eventually, I simply let it come. Set my eyes along the tide. I see it. Point. She nods.

“Two in a day. Do you know how rare that is, Puma?” I shrug. I don’t know.

“We saw a monk seal and two turtles.” I nod because I know that is surreal. That something more than magic has occurred. Something spiritual, something linking us to the land.

“You know, it’s probably telling us something.”

“Hm?”

“Our Aumakua. Maybe they’re telling us to be careful.” I nod.

“Seriously, Puma.”

“I know, I believe it. I believe you.” 

She nods. We wait a while, feel our skin warm, and begin to burn.

“I want to go back in the water,” my cousin ponders. I agree because I am terrified I will begin to burn, and it is the first time I have worn a bikini in a while. We gather ourselves, dripping sand as we walk. We get close, then my cousin halts. Yet again. I halt in solidarity.

“Puma,” her voice dips low, her brows knit and her eyes confused.

“There are turtles.” Again? We sit and I look, She points. I look and look and look. Nothing. I give up then find them. I point.

“No, not there.”

“I see a turtle there.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

“Puma.”

“I think there are multiple.”

“Puma, this is it. Our ancestors.” I nod because I agree. We sit in the sand and watch the turtles pass by. We wait, consider going in the water once more, see another turtle, and abandon any such thought.

“Puma.”

“I know.”

“Puma.”

“I know.”

We contemplate dipping in the water even for a second. Every time we do, a green flash appears and we silence such thoughts. My cousin fixates on the deep. I confuse the waves with scales, big monsters under the sea, but my cousin sees something. I believe her because she isn’t the type to scare someone for the fun of it. We sit guard on the shore with our aumakua roaming ahead of us. We sit and listen, no longer contemplating a quick dip. We listen to the breeze, how the waves crash, and fixate on the deep.

“They’re protecting us.” I hum because I don’t want to be redundant. My cousin looks at me seriously, but turns away, both of us waiting for the sea to settle. For the dark shadow in the deep to pass and the swirl on top of the water that looks too much like a crashing wave to dissolve. Finally, the water is clear. The turtles are gone. Only my cousin and I remain.

When I search what turtles mean, Google tells me they mean wisdom and knowledge. I think for a second that it is telling me something, beyond the dangers along the water. I think about my recent urge to go to grad school, an endeavor that had been building for a year. How I wish to learn ‘Olelo Hawai’i, to digest Pacifika literature, and let this knowledge seep into my bones so that one day, I too may share it. I let the thought come and pass like the saltwater on the sand.

I embrace the moment next to my cousin, embrace the fact that we are here, together for a moment that may not pass again for a while, and let myself rest.

“Kiara?”

“Hm?”

“We should tell Grandma in the car,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, standing up.

Together, we walk towards the sea.

Torn

Fiction and Art by Anonymous

Content Warning: Abuse

If you told me to, I would.

Our relationship requires little to no thinking and I love that.

All I have to do is follow your lead.

Our relationship requires devotion and I’m good at that.

I’m okay with this because I truly believe that I owe myself to you.

So, is it too much to ask for a favor?

Can you save me from this grim end?

I remember when I was first introduced to you. I was so touched that I cried tears of joy, sadness, contempt, and anger simultaneously. Relief washed over me. I couldn’t believe someone such as yourself would open your arms up to me. I was elated. 

I remember the first time I went to you with a concern I had about my parents. You told me to forgive. That was so liberating for me. I stopped putting pressure on myself to make people better from that young age. I stopped telling people how to love me and happily received what others were willing to give me. I stopped being angry about what was happening to me. 

I remember the first time I went to you with a concern I had about my partner. You told me to forgive and spread love. What a beautiful thing. I stopped praying for a sanctuary and made one for myself in this relationship. It no longer matters to me that I try to avoid her presence when she gets home. I don’t think of all the reasons why I act guarded around her. I stopped desperately trying to leave and accepted my fate, trusting you fully. I stopped depending on others for an answer and came only to you.

I keep you in mind always, so why why why did it have to end this way? Maybe it’s because what that stranger told me yesterday was true. I couldn’t handle the truth so he cursed me or something. 

The day of our encounter, I was walking through the park with Souchi. She appreciates all the time outside of the house that we get and it’s great we live nearby such a beautiful and lively space that is dog-friendly. As we walked amongst Palo Verde trees and ground squirrel burrows, I thought of what I was going to tell you that night about my partner’s recent blow-up. It was about you again. They say I spend too much time in my prayer room when they’re home, but they know that’s the only place they grant me any privacy. I admit I am guilty of this. All I have is this closet-sized room dedicated to my faith. And I know that Souchi can tell that not everything is right at the house. Does she understand that you exist for beings like us? You make me forget my worries and keep a smile on my face. I pray for Souchi always and for you to do the same for her that you do for me. She deserves it. Regardless of the recent argument, I had a feeling that I had much to discuss with you as soon as my partner came home that day.

It was during our walk back home that I saw someone coming towards us on the opposite side of the road. There was something abrupt and hostile about his presence. He walked angrily. It was hard to figure out which direction he was going next because of this. His blurry figure became clearer the closer he got, which was a lot faster than I expected. The road was also clear of traffic, so I had an even better view of this man. The way he carried himself puzzled me to the point that I had failed to realize that Souchi was now very close behind me, and had stopped moving. How odd. I could feel her snout nudging me behind my knees. I bent over to pet her, but she yelped when I made contact with her head and started shaking. She had never acted this way before.

Looking at her with worry, my head snapped back up when I thought of the stranger who was walking in our direction. I looked up and saw him clear as day, the distance between us having closed without my notice. Black worn sneakers, baggy blue sweatpants, a stained white tee with a black jacket over it. Stopped in the middle of the sidewalk across the street from Souchi and me. No longer walking with pent-up aggression and now completely still. When our eyes met, I felt an alarm ring in my head, but my body was not able to catch onto this or react appropriately in time. He was staring right at me in what I can only describe as an intimidating manner. And yet I stood there as well, Souchi sitting and whining directly behind my legs. I understood why she was doing this now. I thought to myself, was it me he was looking to confront? The answer was staring me straight in the face.

He took a step closer to us and was standing on the road now. I watched his every movement like my life depended on it. Souchi was on guard but terrified and I knew that if anything were to happen it would be up to me to deal with it. I surveyed his build once more, hesitant to stop making eye contact with him. 

HANDS ARE IN HIS POCKETS. When did that happen? Those jacket pockets are huge, what could be in there? So many things, oh my. He’s smiling at me now, what is it he knows?

I couldn’t control the thoughts and images racing in my mind in a way that reminded me of when I was younger. Yes, exactly! I felt small. He took his left hand out of his jacket pocket, empty. Palms towards the sky, I could see he had nothing to hide. He started taking his jacket off now, his left hand uncovering his right shoulder very slowly. I quickly realized his white shirt was sleeveless and his skin… my God, what was wrong with his skin?! How can flesh resemble mold? I was more perplexed at this point than intimidated. He touched his right shoulder and I felt a tingling sensation on my own at the exact same moment. It shocked me so much I let go of Souchi and she took the opportunity to run off. I was alone now.

He tapped his shoulder three more times and I felt a pain within my shoulder rather than the initial tingling on the surface. He laughed as my eyes widened in genuine fear. I couldn’t believe what he was doing to me, but what he said next still brings me close to an anxiety attack. “Who do I remind you of? Who do you so often share your pain with?” He laughed again, then stared at me with a blank expression. I could tell he had more to say. He gripped his shoulder, causing me to fall to my knees. I couldn’t even soothe my own injury, since I could not see it, and when I tried to touch my shoulder it burned wherever I made contact.

“There’s nothing you can do about this. I know that’s what you tell yourself about everything you go through. All the people you are closest to look down on you, so you end up doing the same. You’re pathetic.” His expression quickly changed to anger once again and suddenly he began to charge at me. I got up from the ground and ran as fast as I could back to my house. 

I could see Souchi from a distance, waiting impatiently for someone to open the front door for her. I was relieved when I was able to do so. I couldn’t bring myself to look back and face the stranger again, scared he might cause me unbearable pain without even having to touch me again. When Souchi and I were safe inside, I wasted no time and sped into the prayer room. I had to rid my mind of these self-deprecating thoughts that were causing my faith to stagger off into the depths while bringing my trauma to the forefront. I spent the rest of the night in the prayer room.

The next day, my partner was banging on the door of my sacred place. Screaming at me, “Who do you think you are leaving me and Souchi alone all night?!” She didn’t even realize that I didn’t know who I was anymore. I stayed up all night wondering about exactly this. I could hear her footsteps as she stormed upstairs. Then, stomping from directly above me and more incoherent screams from my partner. She brought my attention to the ceiling, but what kept it there was this dark stain I didn’t remember being there. I stood up to take a closer look and quickly realized it was mold. 

Mold? Moldy like the flesh on his shoulder. I never bring any water into this space so I thought, how odd. My partner eventually got quiet and I could hear Souchi whining at my door. Once I heard the front door open and close, I decided to let her in. To my surprise, I could not open the door. How strange. I used as much force as I could muster in such a small space and still, I was trapped. I looked around, beginning to panic. I started to see spots of mold all over the walls, not just on the ceiling anymore. I saw spots of mold even when I closed my eyes. I saw spots of mold on my own skin. I don’t know what’s happening but I can sense that this is the end for me. I sit back down and begin to pray once again.

Dear ___,

Make me whole again, please.

Our relationship is all that’s left of me. If you can’t,

Let me go, please.

Don’t make me suffer any longer.

To the Guest Room Floor

Article and art by Katie Lockwood

What I wouldn’t do to spend a night in my grandparents’ guest room

Even on the floor

With the mattress pad that’s too small

And rickety, warm honey, floating closet doors that bang whenever I accidentally toss a limp, sleepy wrist out towards them

Looking at the sage green nightstand

And the cream lamp casting a warm light across the coarse white walls and comforter covers

And the glow-in-the-dark stars next to the muted dried flowers

Wishing I was lying on the bed

Where I could look out the window whose ledge dips just below where the mattress is

Whose cream white curtains and wood sill capture the glow of the room in a familiar orangey-yellow

Against the blue night and snowy lawn

And the neighbors’ Christmas lights in the bottom left corner

Which won’t come down until a forgetful mid-May

By the rope swing and garden bed that act like a fence

And a sleeping black lab who is barely visible against the dead grass

What I wouldn’t do to spend a night in my grandparents’ house

Where grandma would wake up around 10:30 and make coffee and croissants and cinnamon raisin toast 

While grandpa would sit at the kitchen counter reading whatever it was that he read

And they notice that while their coffee has gone cold,  “Homeward Bound” has been floating from the living room TV since 7:00 a.m.

And they could look on the cold couch cushions 

To see her alone, covered in a scratchy cold blanket

And ignore her

And dump the cold coffee in the sink 

Before going out to smoke

I wish I could go back to the old house

I miss the Christmases that I used to dread 

I miss that sacred ground

Of the guest bedroom floor

Can I Explain it to You Properly

As I sit on a plane and disinfect the tray table in front of me

Article by Esabella George Art by Isabella Hageman

I couldn’t tell you if this time my stream of consciousness will lead me to believe that this immediate bulging little life that is mine, in front of me, is taken advantage of. Or worse, I’m a medium drawing out heartbreak over the tray table in a million people’s quickly spent consumption. I know a thousand longing sentimentals held their breath and bit their tongues while gazing out the window, coasting and cruising at altitudes miles away and above the people who hurt them, who they still remain tethered to. And they did this before me. And now dramatic me feels like the first person to want someone to lead them, guide them– something that could make me sacrificial and a believer in something. This is what you get for being high in the sky, a place you were once taught held heaven or eternal life.

Ever since I put the thought into existence, I’ve been assuming that my chewing, crumbling, and misshapen scrunched napkins bring offense to where we left things. And how our “agreements” can seem really like an agreement, until you walk away and realize that all the things you were saying were in opposition to what you really wanted. At least she thinks we’re on the same page?

I cannot fathom fully how many people regard everyday objects as sacred. I keep infinite tabs on the things you have touched, given to me, and described that exist in my dorm room, my childhood room, my car.

I close my laptop. I rarely actually extract my laptop during a flight contrary to my prior ambitious intentions of two-plus hours of conscious alert uninterrupted time. 

I wonder if my religious absence found a place somewhere else in me. I was never even plagued by it, the guilt of not partaking. But religion has a way of sneakily terrorizing you. Who else sporadically attended church with a friend whose family was vaguely? probably? trying to get them to join. It would be every once in a while, but I often finagled having myself over for sleepovers on Saturday nights specifically at the Garrett’s home. I knew I would be receiving some bizarre sense of hope the next morning, and I liked to feel a part of something. I also liked to think that Mr. and Mrs. Garrett thought they were helping me and wondered what I was thinking. I am not friends with Libby anymore. Those steeple moments are pillars embodying my clearest memories of her.

We have got to go back…but I don’t want to make your place too haunted, I think. I believe in ghosts and then I believe in you. This shadow of you possesses me everywhere I go; it’s like my own creation to fill the absence of God.

I’ve never been anything but someone else’s yet. I've heard about how we are all children of God before, and it would be so comforting to believe I belong to someone greater. Sadly, you control me, and I haven't returned to myself yet. No one can equip a dreamer and hopeless romantic enough to be ready to revert to the ways they were before a love completely dismantled them.

I extract a lot of irony in moments like this. Putting people on a pedestal, bizarrely more revolutionary than the popes and changemakers of past centuries: 

1. Splitting the brunch bill with a guy whose family has owned oil shares since two centuries ago. 

2. Getting to edit her job applications, being allowed into that realm of personhood. To learn something about someone in their most vulnerable and vacant place. A once blank page. It excited me how much she opened herself up to the beckoning negative spaces. I imagine the computer cursor flashing back and forth before her like a life flashing by when you’re simply trying to say, “Bye for now.”

Assortments of sacred moments repel me from trusting you.

Ritualistically, in my own form of therapy, I took the bait and made some suggestions, but I want you to know sweetest sweetness, I have no revisions. Whatsoever.

I would do it all over again, so why am I sketching erasing embellishing dwindling every message I write to give you the same generic “I hope all is going great.” Behind that screen is a trembling girl tired of not saying the right things. I ask for divine guidance in times like these. I ask for abrasive hope.

Tell me to come see you

Tell me you think about me in your future rooms like I do with you

Tell me you write my name in little corners of recycled notebooks

Tell me you think I’d like that song or book Ric recommended to you.

Give me another word that makes you flutter like those beetles you collaged for me. 

I’ve got your handwriting on the back of a very large piece of paper in the bottom of one of my drawers. It’s not large enough, unfortunately, to vacate the empty void, the vessel of you in my soul.

When everyone is done, are you joining them too? It’s like the movement of the congregation: are you drawn to the crowds as well?

Your friend offered the two of us drugs one of the first times we were getting together, and I still see your skeptically encouraging smile every time I’m about to do something I probably shouldn’t. Your guidance got me into trouble, perhaps.

I want to write you a perfect sonnet and I need to know if one of those times you were ever laughing at me, not with me. I’m going crazy thinking about what you think about me. 

Maybe someone could sink this ship for me, wave a hand over what’s left, but I know I’d just get right back into our wreckage full of denial at any time in any decade. 

People have these rituals they allow to become sacred, like yoga in the morning, burning the toast just right, and I wouldn’t cross your mind even if I tried today!

I have always been envious of those believers, who do good knowing good is promised for all of their goodness and look forward to what comes next. They aren’t tormented by the passing of time nor humbled by that which gets away and doesn’t come back. You, for example, will perform as a ghost in the rest of my life. I remember describing seeing you again as catching a ghost in the flesh, feeling your limbs again, offering some new divinity from my acquired sixth sense. 

The last time I saw you, one of those days, I had you in my room…with you and me again. It was nice, but it wasn’t the way that having a room with your first love again was supposed to feel. You insisted on helping me fix the drawers I put all my pants in. It was broken. I’m sorry, I really did not want you to fix it. You’re anything but a fixer to me, and knowing you wanted to put something back in place when the thing right in front of you, between me and you, was not being attended to. I think I would have broken the drawer again once you left. I do not want the reminder that you are selective and you can only fix some things.

I’m jealous because I could spend the rest of my life knowing the world doesn’t owe us some big huge reunion. We haven’t inherited some divine right to embrace again in an unearthly spherical realm, and so I am plagued with anxiety day to day. 

It’s a sacred gift, I convince myself, to be able to think about someone to this degree.

I’ve made a habit of greeting you big when I’m feeling so small beside you.

And my two inches taller make me no greater than the mass of foreverness we left behind. 

We had so many firsts and so few seconds. Numerically and in the grand scheme of the blip of my life, the start of my young adulthood. For now, I’m 21 and I want to be held by the 20-year-old you I met and looked up to. 

When I entered the Apotheke the other day, the pharmacists watched me so closely that I felt their eyes burn into me as I perused. I have never known what I’m looking for, how could I tell them so? I could never tell you what I think I wanted. My unknowing and secrecy from the conscious self, a sacred gift that unwraps itself the longer we go on, letting the days of the years of our lives pass I predict so. 

For this reason, God is time to me. I wrote something about it once.

“I used to make fun of my dad because he would say ‘the other day’ all the time 

When referring to something that felt not so recent to me.

I realize that we’re just getting older and the passing of time could very well be the other day. 

I want to sit on the summit of a mountain again and write back to my sister who was taking her ACTs 

She told me when you’re reading this I’ll be a junior…

And I’m reminded of it like yesterday these years later. 

It’s passing. 

I’m screaming inside because my mom can’t remember to save her drafts. 

The world isn’t made for these folks.

Us folks either. 

You drive me crazy and I can’t depend on a template. 

Let you let go.”

…

“The plane was landing more rapidly than I was used to

But I stared out the window strongly

And didn’t think about the voice over us all.

I thought about you receiving the news

And I didn’t even quiver. 

I guess all in all I want to be grieved

Like I grieve for you.

My dying thought would be I’m sorry it happened to me. 

I wish the stupid lights in this plane would turn off

The cricket sounds in “Green Arrow” aren’t helping, they’re almost epilogue-esque (a eulogy)

We remain confused by the direction the buses of our future will go

And worry about train delays and faulty time frames

While we envision a possibility of the same roof containing our multitudes 

The Ides of March were approaching 

I don’t recall being stabbed in the back

Yet fear is forthcoming

Every March appears to be harmonious 

Like our last one. 

And you’ll be 23 this time around

And I’ll be listening for the trumpets. 

A peacefully provoking person

Unintentional character manipulation 

I’ve lost a lot of kindness

Appeasing yours

I won’t consider time to have been lost

When I inevitably glance back

But stolen

Nobody wants to be reminded how foolishly they reached into their pockets to spend time

But really we coaxed those fears in each other

Everybody wants to be the person that the person who loves them thinks they are. 

So my time was well spent being loved and a lie at the same time. 

And what’s been stolen we don’t have to talk about

Time

You’re no kleptomaniac

Though you’ve stood on stolen ground longer than me in these lifetimes.”

A Letter From 5:00 am

Article by Katie Rowley Art by Isabella Hageman

I greet February with a buzzing alarm on my wrist. It is time to wake up. Darkness reigns as the sun begins to fight its way into the day. Clouds scatter the skyline. Eyelids forced open, joining the sun in its battle against the soothing black of sleep. I force my hand to reach not for the phone buried underneath one of my pillows but for the always full water bottle. It rests on my grandmother’s nightstand, next to a stack of books and crystals and my mom’s Tiffany lamp. Tired fingers fumble around in the dark for the inline rotary cord switch; it’s finicky and worn down. The light flickers as I push the wheel, ridges pressing into my finger tips. A warmness floods my room. Hand recedes back to my body and I stretch. White metal encasing the 32 ounces of water I will soon swallow lifts into the air with my arms. I shake out the exhaustion. Breathe in the quietness that only comes from seven sleeping roommates. I relish in the silence. In the superiority of seeing the sun break into the day. I relish being the first thing the sun touches. I relish the hours alone. The sleeping hours sacrificed since thirteen.

The water bottle reaches my lips and last night’s stale water I poured from our apartment sink faucet washes away the saliva stuck to gums and in between teeth. My dreams wash away as I swallow. Thirty minutes must pass before I reach for my phone. My watch keeps track as I reach over and grab the Plath that has lived on my nightstand since October. A stolen paper snowflake bookmarks my dismal progress. She writes too many lists of too many names I do not know. I keep waiting to see myself in her but I know I will never finish her. Still, fingers flick to the page I gave up on eight hours ago. Pages are read. The sun struggles against the clouds. Water is devoured. Thirty minutes tick by. 

Hand dives under pillow, grasping at my phone. Anxious at what awaits behind a passcode. There is nothing. In an hour there will be a text from Mom. But, there was silence in the night. And there will be silence this morning. I scroll Twitter. I send Mom my Wordle score. I scroll TikTok. I open my morning routine checklist note, happy to check off no phone, reading, and water. I open the app that tells me which workouts I should be doing based on if I am bleeding or not. A twenty-one minute lymph node detox yoga exercise is done when I convince myself to shove discarded clothes into a corner and roll out my purple yoga mat. I am worried my feet are too loud; the foam does not seem to silence me enough. Blood, that grew still in the night, runs its way through arteries and vessels. Heart ventricles pump. Oxygen flows in and carbon dioxide flows out. 

I roll up the mat. Hand throws phone on bed. I decide to stop ignoring the pressure of my bladder and break into the day with a run to the bathroom. I scurry back to my room. I pull out the scale and make sure I weigh less than yesterday. I walk back to the window. Navy sky outside has begun to lighten. Snow is melting and it is still too cold for a morning walk. I plan for one in the afternoon. I check the time. 6:00 am. I sit on the edge of my bed, feet dangling in the air. I am trying to decide if I should clean my room or shower. The eastern sunlight slowly sneaks into my room. I chose shower and lay out jeans and one of mom’s sweaters. 

The water is hot. Maybe too hot. The suds are in my hair and on my body and in my eyes. I do not feel ashamed when I look down. I speak to a high power through the water streaming down my face. I am so lucky. Everything is always working out for me. Hi, my name is Katie and this is my debut book. I am the luckiest girl in the world. I get everything I want. I say amen with a twist of the faucet. Let it linger on cold. A baptism. 

Wrapped in pink towels, I stand and love myself in the mirror. I rub CeraVe vitamin C serum and a thirty dollar moisturizer and 30 SPF sunscreen onto the soft skin of my face. Still surrounded by silence, I savor the moment. The connection. The ridges of my nose and cheekbones and jaw. Teeth are brushed and alarms behind shut doors are going off. They are snoozed. A purple straightener given to me by a middle school best friend is plugged in. 

Feet shuffle to room. The door is shut. The towel drops. Lacy bra and matching thong bought to impress a boy two years ago are slipped on. Jeans and the sweater follow. The towel wrapped up in my hair is taken down. I bend down to put on black socks. And I slide back to the bathroom. Hang up towels and stare at myself in the mirror some more. Sometimes Heather is up by now and we gossip over the buzz of electric toothbrushes. Today she is still sleeping. Bangs are straightened and thin brown hair is brushed. One final prayer is said: today will be a good day. 7:00 am. 

Phone is grabbed and headphones are placed in ears as I venture past the sleeping second floor, down to the kitchen. I grab the black frying pan and place it on the stove. I turn on the heat. I grab an egg and bread and deli turkey and cheese I selected from the $5 cheese bin at King Soopers. I fry the egg. I grind the salt and pepper. I shake the red pepper. I toast the bread, put it on a plate. I flip the egg. I cut cheese and place it on the egg. I dig through the basket of pan lids and find the small one. I fill the edge with water from our sink and pour onto the hot pan. The cheese melts. I put turkey on top. I lift the egg to the bread. Carry the plate back up the stairs. I eat in my room.

8:00 am. For an hour I watch the sunlight consume my room. I lay on my bed. I fold clothes. I read a few more pages of Plath. I pack my backpack. I count my calories. I look over my schedule. I tie up my Reeboks. I grab my jacket from where it is slumped on the floor. I grab my door handle, the metal cool in my hands. I breathe in the last moments of the day I will have complete to myself. I breathe in the control. I breathe. I am sacred before 9:00 am. 

⏤⏤⏤

June comes with the always constant 5:00 am alarm. The twin sized mattress is on the floor. Boxes are scattered in the shoebox of a room. I am awake before the buzzing begins. Eyes still shut, trying to prompt sleep all night. The dreams never come. Brain too racked with anxiety. When the alarm rings, my eyes shoot open. Hand snatches phone from underneath my pillow. A text from Mom: How are you doing? Yesterday there were tears and a man who shot discomfort so deep into my bone marrow, it will take a lifetime to disappear. I begged them to not leave me. I watched them drive away from my bedroom window. Waved to them with sobs still stuck in my throat. 

This morning, the white water bottle sits empty on the wooden floor. I do not reach for it, hands too invested in phone. I text Mom back. I open Twitter. It is only 5:10 am. There is no room to unroll the purple yoga mat. It is warm enough for a walk, but there is no courage to place my hand on the metal door handle and step outside. I watch minutes tick by, still lying on the mattress. I switch between Twitter and TikTok. I pull the yellow comforter up to my neck. I sink deeper into the pillows. I try my hardest to not fall back to sleep. I have work at 9:00 am. I will leave at 8:45 am. 

7:30 am. Hand drops phone on twin mattress. I throw off the comforter. Brisk air let in from the cracked windows engulf every inch of skin not covered by the hand-me-down, vintage, oversized TCU t-shirt. I stretch my arms up to the ceiling, trying to release the anxiety from shaking hands. It does not work. I force my sock-covered feet to meet the floor and my body to stand. I search through duffle bags to find jeans and a t-shirt and rain jacket. June has brought rain this year. I grab my towel from its place in a box. I scurry from my room to the bathroom down the hallway. The air outside my room sticks to my skin. I wash away the humidity and tears of yesterday with   a swift and scared shower. No time for prayers. I do my skincare with shaky hands. Straighten my bangs. Dress. Return to my room, grabbing a banana from the unpacked grocery bag that sits on my Winnie the Pooh chest. I watch clouds form in the west. The sun rose long ago, breaking into a blue blue sky. But the rain will come. I pack my laptop and journal in my tote bag. I do not feel in control. Countdown the minutes before 8:45 am. 

When I have to leave, I turn left to walk to campus. I do not look at the church next door. I do not feel god. 

⏤⏤⏤

A semester and a graduation pass. It is January. I wake with a ring from an alarm clock I begged my mom to buy me. I try to return to the routine. I stay off my phone for 30 minutes. Reading books. Brandon gave me a stack in October. I feel bad I’ve only read two of them. I feign an interest in their words. I drink water from the half-empty white bottle. But when I allow my hand to reach under pillow and grab phone, there is nothing stopping me from wasting hours. No class. No job. There is nothing for me. I send Mom my Wordle score. I feel cursed lying in bed. Unholy, covered in yesterday’s disappointments and dreams of boys that haunt me. I stay wrapped in a heated blanket until dogs barge in, stampeding me. Until Mom comes to ask me what my plans are. I waste away on my phone. I will spend the whole day floating around in discontent with myself.  I do not bother to stretch. I shake sleep from my limbs as I walk to the bathroom. I put in contacts. I stare at myself as I brush my teeth. I cannot recognize the girl staring back at me. 

Grief, God-Optional

Article by Addie Dodge Art by Isabella Hageman

My future comes in an email. And my future comes with fine print. There’s an ultimatum on my future that makes deciding anything difficult. 

When my future came in an email, there was a brief breath of relief, of yes, good, this is good, good that there is, in fact, a place for me when I graduate in May. And somewhere between that inhale, exhale, and the next, I started crying. Something was ripping apart inside of me, viscera pulling at the seams, splitting open. Something numb, something very old muscling into motion. My shoes were on and my jacket too and I was already out the door as the sobs continued to break. Fight or flight, and flight seemed like the best option because you can’t really fight an email telling you to decide on your future by January 8th. 

Even in the midst of my stumbling, snotting stupor out into the bleak slush of melting snow, I knew that I was upset about something beneath the skin, something that only barely had to do with my future in an email. Upset that I had less than a month to say yes or no, sure, that. But that tearing thing, that torn, toothsome thing, that gnawing ache in my gut, was something else. A new flavor of grief, that he isn’t here to see and speak to the bullshit of this future alongside me. 

It was a cloudy day, one of those rare blankets of gloom dripping down over the jutted lip of the mountains and covering everything dark and dull. The sun hadn’t come out all day, the snow was starting to scab over into ice on the ground. And I walked, and I cried, and somewhere in the swirl of that, fingers of light started to thread through. And believe me, I know how bullshit-woo-woo-Jesus-freak this sounds. It has nothing to do with Jesus, I assure you. The sun came out, and the cynical part of me feels embarrassed to even type this, but it was a visceral knowledge that it was some thread, some filament of him made present and made real. He was there. He was there watching me bitch and moan about him not being there. And I kept walking, and some part of my mind was watching this happen, freaking out all the while because I knew this was different than anything I had felt before. You could make saints out of that feeling. Like relief, like a hand held out, palm held up for you to rest yours in. Like seeing and being seen, that kind of relief. 

By the time I got home, my fingers stiff with cold and my face frozen under a thin pall of snot and salt, I was calm. I was still crying, but I was calm, for the first time in a long time.

Curled over my phone, I told a friend of mine all of this over a blubbering voice memo, along with a memory that floated up to the surface. I was around eight years old, and my family was visiting a friend of my parents. A man with two boys and a wife who died in her sleep, sudden and shocking. I was in the car with that man and his two boys, watching a river sighing alongside the curving stretch of road we were driving on. Wyoming, thin air and crisp blue and green, and the sun doing that holy thing, that threading thing from behind a perfect fold of cloud, sending plaits of light to lay over the land. And the older boy, I think he was five, in a voice plain with conviction and belief told everyone to look, because there was his mom in those plaits of light. A child of avowed atheists, I kept my lips pointedly thin and closed, but I do remember some part of me, that human part that wants, thinking that it must be nice to believe something like that so certainly. Surely, that man with the wife who died in her sleep worked very diligently to instill that belief in his boys, a sort of survival mechanism. I half-understood it then, but I feel it deeply now. We are meaning-making creatures after all, and death is not known to abide by our need for cause and effect, for effective explanation.

His funeral was last January, and I watched it on the small screen of my phone while everyone was over there, and I was still here. I couldn’t get over there, where everyone else flocked to, because I was here and I was sick, sick, sick, the cruelest joke of all. I watched my friend get buried over YouTube. And friend feels like such a failing word, flimsy, thin, and not the whole of the truth. Know that I mean something very genuine when I say friend, something deep beneath the skin. And that something deep beneath the skin was puckering and hissing up to the surface as I started walking through the doldrums of suburbia, scrubbing hard at stray salt on my cheeks and sniffing up snot like a broken doll. 

When he died, and when there were new phone numbers of new people to check on, and be checked on by, still an implied lean on one another, shuffling through the immediate aftermath in a strange coagulation of a crutch, I was told by a few of these new people that they could feel him with them. He was coming to them in dreams, how nice. He was coming to them in deer and rabbits and birds, how nice. He was coming to them in a slant of light that looked like God on the living room rug, how nice. I smiled, nodded, and cried when they cried, but my tears were from frustration. No, thanks, I couldn’t feel him at all. I would stop in my tracks and stare at every squirrel I came across on campus, sometimes even asking him, a thick flush of shame as I muttered a desperate plea for him to show me a sign. The squirrels paid me no mind, and sleep was dreamless. 

The thing that most people won’t admit about grief is that most of the time, it feels like anger. I have been very angry for almost a year because anger feels better than the hurt of the truth. It’s not sadness, not mute enough or dull enough to be called sadness. It’s obliteration of a particular kind. It’s a pure blade of pain that is constant, that you build muscle around eventually, making it hurt less until it twists itself again inside you and you’re bleeding out anew. I was bleeding out again, thinking about my future in an email, and longing like a child for him to be here and he’s not and he’s dead and there’s the truth, a thumb dug into the wound, twist and pull. 

It seemed like everyone else was being touched by an angel, and I was stuck rotting in my anger. I think, at the most basic level, that religion offers us somewhere to set that anger down. The light became something other than light, and my anger was transfigured along with it.

What I felt and sensed that day on my walk can be called by another name, like most holy things. Divine turned disease. I think of saints receiving visions from God, and the thin line that separates the sacred from the insane. Delusions, thought insertion, the suggestion of a mind starting to unravel. I think mine already has. I think I’m trying to stitch it back together with something that tastes like faith.  

Let me make something clear. This isn’t me saying I’ve started going to church, to temple, to whatever place of worship you might name. This isn’t me saying I’ve become a devotee, making a martyr out of my grief. What I am doing is making a religion for myself in order to keep myself alive. I am choosing to believe in sacred over insane.

Nick Cave, a musician who lost both of his sons unexpectedly, obliteratingly, said that religion is spirituality with rigor. An active participation, a belief in something outside the realm of logic and cynicism, and an active maintenance of that belief. It’s a choice to believe that he was there, is here in some strange way. And it goes down much sweeter to think it holy, rather than hallucination. 

Grief releases you from a lot of shame. You will do things in grief that you would have balked at previously. Sometimes I ask him to turn stoplights green and it works about as well as random probability allows it to. Sometimes I’m walking on campus and I see the back of a head that looks like his and I stop breathing long enough to remind myself of the impossibility of that. Visions and signs and building a religion out of them, some vague belief made out of juvenile logic that there is something else, that this is as simple, as painless as him stepping out of the frame, still here in some other way.

People pray when bad shit happens, and make answers for themselves out of religion. People get angry when bad shit happens, and hand that anger over to faith. I am trying to do these things. Some of the time, I get it right. Most of the time, I fail and fall back into cynicism. I wake up with my teeth clenched and I stomp around in something close to an existential temper tantrum. In case you were wondering, yes, I am really fun at parties. 

This religious, religion thing is an experiment for a cynic, reformed. But I still stop for the squirrels, craning my neck to watch them dip and bob, people parting around the freak stuck in the middle of the sidewalk, interpreting life as a sign in and of itself. I am often late to class because of this. 

Sorry, my friend was there. Sorry, the squirrel looked back that time. There are exactly no cultures that consider squirrels holy. Jury’s still out.

The Face of God

Testimony of a Bleeding Nose

Article by Margot Swetich Art by Isabella Hageman

I was baptized the summer I was sixteen. I brought an extra set of clothes to change into afterwards so my atheist parents wouldn’t know how far my new convictions went. I suppose I already had one foot out of the baptism pool because I wanted to keep it a secret. Of course, I think my mom knew anyway– she always seemed to know everything, somehow. Recently, when I told her I was nervous that she’d react negatively to a choice I was making, she said, “There is very little I could ever judge you for.” But I have always been like that, wishing to have secret corners of my life. No matter how little the world cares to look at me, I glare back at it as if it’s scowling.

The baptism happened outside, in a large kiddie pool filled with hose water. A person stood on either side of me, and I kneeled on soft plastic, the water up to my chest. They held my arms and pushed me under, my black t-shirt flying up against the movement. When they pulled me out of the water, my nose started bleeding. It was an omen, I remember thinking, the way my blood fell into sacred water.

A year before I chose to be baptized, I kissed the face of God on a Sunday. The pastor gave a sermon about the purpose of humans and God. He had a diagram of the world, and high up in the clouds of a tall mountain was the light of God that we were all supposedly striving towards. He said that humans were like killer whales who weren’t doing any killing until we had God. What was the point of a killer whale that didn’t kill?

His point came across: humans are miserable without purpose, and by extension without God. I suddenly understood that my life would be forever incomplete if I didn’t embrace this theology. Now, I think his analogy may have been flawed. Why did God want me to be a killer?

But it didn’t matter, because I was fifteen and the theology that the pastor was sharing didn’t need to make sense to mean something. I started crying after the final worship song and he came and sat with me. That’s when he said it. “Margot, you have kissed the face of God. Don’t ever forget it.”

I felt a deep physical sense of bliss and despair and overwhelm that the pastor told me was the presence of God. I knew in that moment what it felt like to believe, and I knew that I could now choose to believe in God. I could no longer say I simply didn’t understand, or that the choice wasn’t available to me, having been raised without spiritual knowledge. I decided I would take that feeling, that emotional spirituality I had unlocked, and use it to create a new religious identity for myself. 

I threw myself into an identity of belief and the community of my church and I sought out that feeling of peace again and again. I felt it in worship on Sundays, and when I held my youth pastor’s babies. I felt it when I sunk into a warm bath and knew that I was armored and safe. I spoke to God when I was so depressed that I could hardly see a way forward, and it lifted me out of the darkness.

Now when I joke about my religious phase to friends, I say that I’m always on the verge of falling back in love with Jesus. It’s true that if I got depressed enough, if I lost track of myself completely, I might find myself going to a church. The purpose that saved me once would save me again.

You are supposed to believe that being a Christian is the only path to heaven, or to being saved, but I always had a sense that this wasn’t true. In my mind, anything that makes life more bearable– be it religious practices or the comforts of family and the hobbies we indulge in– will serve the same purpose as Christianity. Jesus saves through the ritual of belief, the community of the church, and the belief that you have touched something greater than yourself. 

These days, church spaces still introduce a tinge of that old blissful feeling. My love for churches is probably fueled by my desire to feel anything at all, but something shifts in my body in those spaces. This past summer in Canterbury Cathedral, I asked a friend of mine who grew up Mormon how it felt for her to be in a place like that. “It doesn’t really affect me,” she told me, “our churches weren’t like this.”

Neither were mine, I wanted to tell her. So why did I feel something there? Why does a part of me still insist upon sensing God in these stained glass windows and pews?

I think I still believe in God, even as an atheist. I remember how it felt to believe and that’s not something you forget. What you don’t realize when you have never been religious is that most believers are fighting their doubt, swallowing it down like bile in their throat. Part of the magic of religion is that you are so sure that it’s impossible, yet you have a feeling of certainty, a personal collection of evidence that builds upon itself. Some days I think believing is weak because it’s easier than facing the fact that our lives are meaningless, but sometimes I think it’s really brave. I learned what a “leap of faith” was when I started taking them every Sunday. 

I am sick of conversations about whether or not God exists. I don’t think they give us anything. God is real if any one person actively believes he is. God changes and moves the world because there are believers who are acting in his name, so that the concept of God becomes undeniably more powerful than the question of whether the omniscient being exists at all. There are people to do his bidding, and this is what makes him real. God’s values are real because there is a material and emotional impact on our world and individuals, caused by religious people who think they are acting on God’s values. God is in the people, in the societies that interpret the Bible and use its perceived meanings for merciful love or for genocide, and everything in between.

A part of me still yearns for religiosity. I want the world to be sacred and meaningful, even if I’m aware I’m putting that spin on things. The reality is that I can’t force myself to feel God, even in Canterbury Cathedral. Instead, I feel something akin to spiritual peace in strange moments, like on the bus ride home from the cathedral. There I was, trying to decipher the French of the girls sitting next to me when my chest swelled with that same peculiar joy. It is a playful fact of my life that sometimes a bus ride and a good song are better than a hymn in a centuries-old cathedral.

Bury Me, Please

Article by Margalit Goldberg Art by Aiden Ingenthron

“Hold your breath so you don’t let the ghosts in,” my friend instructed as we drove towards my home and approached the turn onto my street. I was eight years old and thoroughly confused. Everybody knew that you had to hold your breath while you drove through tunnels– Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 being the toughest and therefore most important feat to prove your capabilities– but past a cemetery? I realized that if it was true, that you could breathe in ghosts, I would be thoroughly haunted by now. And if I was haunted by anything, it was by the violence of living people in the world, not the dead. This was one of those moments where you see clearly into someone’s life and their relationship with the world, and it looks nothing like yours.

I’ve lived my entire life half a block away from a cemetery. I can recall the names on the headstones that can be seen through the chain-link fence that I’ve passed innumerable times: Melmud, Cohn, Jacobs. I still wonder why the owner of the headstone carving storefront got up and left one day. And I always return to wander the paths near my house when I’m back home. Fairmount Cemetery is as saturated into my life as any of the schools I’ve attended. My mom would drive me around the cemetery when I was a baby and couldn’t sleep, letting the quietude of death soothe the new life she had brought into the world. We would take family walks through the plots, mostly admiring the fall colors. I even attended a summer camp where we took headstone etchings and then wrote a story about the person we chose. As I got older and started to grasp the concept of death, I understood the intended purpose of the space, but it was never haunted to me. 

When I was in high school, we’d jump the fence and play hide and seek until the night patrol came. We would stumble, drunkenly laughing, through the headstones until we found the fence and scrambled back over, trying not to rip our clothes. We did this until my friend got locked in the mausoleum and we had become aware enough to question if this was too disrespectful of a shenanigan. I had my first kiss on one of those nights, nervous and giddy and wondering what everyone would think of me, including the bodies that lay below my feet. 

The cemetery was one of my only reprieves during lockdown. I’d roll a joint in my room while my camera was off during Zoom class and as soon as I could log off, I’d walk down the street and through the gates and light up in a corner no one had been buried in since 1937. At a time when death tolls were displayed everywhere, I found myself wanting to be around people who had died decades ago. I wanted to be anywhere but in 2020 in my childhood bedroom, and I got away by time traveling to the past. I convened with Spanish flu victims, who were probably just as shocked as we were when they were told to wear masks and mandated to stay inside. I gathered with victims from all the offensive wars we’ve fought and considered the thousands of miles their bodies had to travel to come home. 

In Victorian times, cemeteries effectively functioned as parks since city recreational space did not exist yet. They were a place to get fresh air, picnic, and court a lover all while paying a visit to those who were no longer with you. Most likely, that visit was paid to more than one immediate family member, and the memory of their final days took place not in a sterile hospital but in the bedroom next to yours. We are both closer to and further away from death than we ever have been. Maybe it's time we familiarize ourselves with it again? 

When people ask me what I want done with my body when I die, I say I have a plot already. And it’s not because I have thought this question through enough times and know for certain that I want a plot so I purchased one. It is because in the early 1900s, my family pooled their money to buy a plot in a Jewish cemetery in Denver: Rose Hill. Now, generations later, I have a place to be buried when I die. Founded in 1892, on the outskirts of Denver, it is still open today and located in what is now Commerce City. 

I remember burying my Grandpa at Rose Hill, although I can’t recall how long it takes to drive there. I haven’t returned since we unveiled his gravestone– a year after he was buried in a plain pine box. Jewish ritual insists on the simplest of burial preparations. No one is prepared for returning differently from another, therefore there are few upgrade packages for the Funeral Home Director to market to us. Or at least that’s what happens at Rose Hill, because it maintains its ability to bury any Jew of any denomination. This means you cannot have an ornate gravestone, a casket is optional, and the deceased must receive a ritual washing. Burial, if conditions allow, is supposed to happen no more than three days after death and a body is never to be embalmed. There is no open casket or wake.

Our time mourning in community does not end once the funeral is over. I met so many cousins and aunts and old friends I’d never seen before while I, alongside my family, sat shiva for seven days mourning my Grandpa. It is also Jewish tradition to have refreshments of an alcoholic sort at the burial so people can toast, “l’chaim, to life!” We celebrated his life and our lives and I learned how to make a Moscow Mule. This is what I hope happens when I die. Ultimately, death rituals and practices are really more for the living than the dead. I hope the living are able to walk past my gravestone, under an awning of fall leaves, as I decompose underneath. Only if I’m lucky will they stop to think about who I was.