It rained on the drive back from work. At one point I turned my head to check for coming traffic and the clarity of the rain beading my window distracted me as I turned my head again to check in the other direction. They were like camera lenses, my eyes – catching the fragments of life in a fish net of seemingly unimportant things: the broken sea shells, the doves of sand dollars, the chipped conks of overgrown crabs.
I took the long way home, because I was in no hurry to return.The Civil Wars’ The Violet Hour played on repeat. Initially, I was using the song to stimulate ideas for my story, but then I thought of the glass-painted Jesus over the pastor’s podium, His head tipped up to the sky, murky with swirls of midnight and orange, His eyes cringed in desperation. The pastor stood below with three layers of gold offering plates raised to Him. I had to stop singing. My throat strained, eyes burned. But there was nothing to keep me from crying in the car. There were no grandparents or my mother or familiar faces of people who’d become strangers to hold me back.
I dipped my head. The windshield wiper squeaked over the glass. I looked up, mouth twisting. I saw myself fall into His arms, the same way I had during the Offering, brown hands wrapping around my back. There were no napkins in my console since I’d stopped going to fast food restaurants. I used the soft turtle I kept on my dashboard to wipe my eyes. The tip of his leg is doused with morning mascara.
When the day had started, I’d wanted to go to church. I told myself I was going for my mother, but I was really going for myself. I realized that when the sermon preached of Timothy. We are not meant to have spirits of timidity, but spirits of power and love and self-discipline; he had a living and life-giving faith. I wondered briefly if that’s why Pam Tebow named her son Tim, and how fitting it was for him, knowing what he’s become.
At work I felt stoic. I wondered if maybe the Mother’s Day video the pastor showed in church was appropriate. Not everyone writes letters to their mother, expressing their gratitude with heartfelt words of years’ long appreciation. Not every mother is so picturesque. I thought of how I’d like to be living: on a farm with gardens, eating sliced cucumber over the kitchen sink. I took my coffee black for the first time. It wasn’t as unbearable as I expected, but still cause for cringing as the liquid passed through the pit of my throat. I thought a person must be truly tough if they could learn to take their coffee black.
During lulled parts of the service at church, I imagined myself on that farm with chickens and goats and horses and cows. I imagined myself in a white dress, pregnant, my hair pulled back in a tousled bun, my bangs twisted back with small clips. I wear a gray, slouchy cardigan and maroon, felt flats. The floors are wooden and white-washed, the drapes thin and opalescent; they wave in the zephyrs leaking through the cracked windows. Somewhere around the house is my husband. When he walks into the room, I smile. “My mother wasn’t a perfect woman…” the pastor says. I revert my eyes to the podium.
Later, back at my parents’, they would ask me why I was so sad. I’m horrible at faking my emotions. If I smile when I’m not in the mood, it feels something like dancing on Pointe without toe-pads. I suppose some people can still chasse across the stage, numb to the pain, but I have not yet mastered that art. But how do you tell your family that you feel like a sore thumb in their crowd? That their doomsday talk of politics is, to you, a platter of depression and withdrawal? Sometimes I’d like to move to France at the risk of being called a Communist like people fancy labeling Johnny Depp. It would just give me a reason to brandish my shield and sharpen my swords.
At my grandparents’, I became entranced by the movie The Quiet with Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle. It put me in one of my haunted moods. I watched as Camilla Belle pretended to be deaf. I watched her comfort her screwed up godsister. I watched her sleep with a high school boy. I watched her kill her godfather. I didn’t like how she pretended to be deaf. I wanted her to actually be deaf. I wanted the quietness to mean something more than a girl retreating into herself.
The other day while I was reading, a horrible Pop song reverberated through my head. The internal noise was maddening. I closed my eyes and mentally worked to penetrate the noise with a ponderous, empyreal Jon Foreman song. I closed my eyes, the two songs gathering their armies of notes. Would I slacken to the obnoxious, disorderly rampages of my mind or would I control it, master my thoughts? It made me think of Harry and his Occlumency lessons. The notes clanged together, an eruption of music arm-wrestling for the terrain of my mind, my sanity. I struggled against the stampede of the persistent Pop song, but like in Order of the Phoenix, my will to overcome myself strengthened. The lethargic chords of Over the River melted into a wave of water, washing out the unwanted clamor of bad music.
My mind is a fortress. Unlike most with armies of men standing guard, I stand alone. I am the defeater and the defeated. My only weapon is God, and my strength only runs as strong as my faith.
