“I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives”
Ecclesiastes 2:3b
This Is How I Drown
When I was four, my family went to Hawaii. We did not generally take vacations; in fact, this was one of only three I can recall throughout my childhood. I have come to regard my parents as distant, fantastical planets whose orbits only catastrophically collided to produce two children, one boy and one girl, nineteen months apart. We always did feel like tectonic plates on the verge of a devastating quake.
In Hawaii, I remember spending my days in the hotel pool, my parents nowhere to be found. They should have been off falling in love, but more than likely were falling out of it. I slapped goggles over my head and dove for the rough white bottom of that pool, mistakenly swallowing chlorinated water until my parents finally emerged to peel the sun off our shoulders. One night, they let me and my brother climb into the hot tub and play in the giggling bubbles that creeped across our chests, necks, and heads. I think I was trying to teach myself how to drown in that hot tub, a practice I habituated in a dismal porcelain bathtub as a suicidal fifteen-year-old. When I was three, I nearly did drown. I have no recollection of my fully clothed, business-woman mother jumping in to untangle me from the throes of our backyard swimming pool. Despite my mom’s heroism, there was no salvation to be had from the continual process of drowning I’ve been engaged in ever since. There’s still water inside me, in all of the wrong places.
We took a helicopter to go look at the magma spilling from the pores of ancient volcanoes’ wide, gaping grins. These volcanoes are the grandmothers of us all, the ones that haunt our picture frames and therapy sessions and dreams. How many secrets do they promise to keep in their winking eyes?
As my toddlerhood waned, I used to ask my dad if I could take my shoes off when I got to Heaven to run on the clouds. I loved God then, because I had yet to be hurt by Him or those who claimed to love Him. I loved Christianity because it all seemed so simple; I carried my heaven and hell around in black and gold pony beads that dangled around my wrist. I loved my parents even though they never promised to love a queer daughter. I must have loved my body too, even if I can’t remember it.
These are the secrets I try to drown in bathtubs and swimming pools and volcanic ash.
Let me tell you about them.
Christians Like Me
Imagine this,
You are four years old. Someone has told you that you are a sinner: fundamentally flawed, irreparably so, filthy. It all seems so simple: the wages of sin is death, and the only person who can save you is a three-headed beast named God. Do you want to accept his free gift of salvation?
You are nine years old. You’re at a summer camp for your church, learning about how to be a better Christian. Being a better Christian is all about guilt, you realize. You’re nothing without Christ, after all.
You are ten years old. In your diary, you write that you are lonely. In your prayer journal, you tell God he is your best friend. But how can anyone with a best friend be lonely?
You are thirteen years old. You fall in love with a girl, a girl, a girl. You wish you were dead. Love feels like dying. Love is dying, naked on a tree.
You are fifteen years old. Your grandfather slips into eternal sleep, finally. You can stop crying because you’ll see him again, in another life. But you ask God to save you again, just to be sure.
You are seventeen years old. Your grandmother falls off a boat and dies. You can’t stop crying because queer girls don’t get to see their grandmas in Heaven. You’ve never felt so alone.
You are eighteen years old. You’re finally graduating from the school where you found God, loved him, and left him.
___________
On the outside, the school I spent fourteen years at looks just like every other school. The red bricks are stacked on top of one another in neat, symmetric lines; inside, the parallel hallways stack four-year-olds next to raucous thirteen-year-olds. If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to miss the ways its walls brush up against a tangle of cement hills and railroad tracks with whoosh-ing trains that make your teeth chatter as they go by. I walked in as a khaki-shorted toddler with Velcro shoes and left an acne-studded teenager sporting an out-of-dress-code sweatshirt and a bad attitude. The hallways are painted a nursery yellow and proud evergreen, with red and green square tiles spotting the floor. As a kindergartener, I tucked my toes neatly inside these tiles and held bubbles in my mouth, already conditioned to lovingly obey. When the school first opened, it was a U-shaped building, neatly divided by a courtyard pocketed with holes (the result of an incessant drought) that threatened to consume my shoes during recess. I migrated through elementary school, eating lunch in the same cafeteria I raised hands to God in worship on Wednesdays and took my dad to dances in.
The U-shaped building has now burgeoned into a two-story rectangle, adjoined by a sparkling, white high school; disjoint campuses that trespass on streets named after the Native American tribes I was taught politely moved out of the way. The parallel hallways now house art classrooms, where 7th graders were told what I had made was distinctly “not art.” The gym, where boys and girls learned to bashfully strip into sour green-and-grey P.E. uniforms, organizes these hallways and reminds me gender will never be mine for the taking. Even though it’s been over a year since I’ve graduated, I’m still too afraid to find out what it would look like if I weren’t someone’s daughter—if I weren’t God’s daughter. Stained glass peeks through a chapel that waves to all who drive by, tossing rainbows onto the linoleum squares that my shoes no longer fit in. The air is perfumed by a haunting eternality, preserving the hallway where I learned my classmate had died by suicide and used a folding-table-turned-altar to ask for forgiveness. In the face of a sixteen-year-old’s death, my school rejoiced in the knowledge that he had been “saved.” I did not feel like rejoicing as I stumbled through a haze of deeply disorienting grief, silently wishing I had been the one to take my life when I was suicidal earlier that year—as if this would have saved him. As it turned out, only Jesus can die in someone else’s place. That fall, I bought my classmate a 17th birthday card and left it at the foot of a cross, knowing we had done everything except save him. You can still trace your fingers over the peeling green paint on the staircase railing where I came out to my best friend, next to a lost and found bin. The science classroom where I slid my hands under their shirt three years later still harbors black-top tables used for dissecting sheep brains, women who love women, and evolution. Every fixture is conducive in the school’s two-decade long production of college-prepped disciples of the Lord.
School was a place of becoming just as much as it was a place of unbecoming. It was where I could be anything, except for an artist, except for an atheist, except for a faggot—a curse that floated through those halls so casually, so unashamedly.
___________
I’ve spent my first years of college grappling with God, education, and my education about God. More than anything, I want to once again welcome religion back as a fixture in my life. My freshman year, I propped my Bible up on my dormitory bookshelf, then sheepishly hid it with an amalgamation of physics and chemistry textbooks. If it was sacrilegious to conflate these bodies of knowledge, I took no notice of it. Really, I think science and religion are searching for the same answers in different places. Or maybe, I’m just searching for the same answers in different places.
According to a 2014 PEW Research study on religious landscaping, 73% of Houstonians identify as Christian. Recently, I encountered a man on campus carrying a bright yellow “Jesus Saves” sign, proselytizing everyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. I was once approached by two members of a campus Christian organization on my way to the library, asking if I wanted to attend their weekly Bible study. I can walk across the street from my dorm room and fall prostrate in three separate churches. Even in a city of over two million people, I still find God in the most inconvenient of places.
___________
delusion: a belief that is not true; a false idea
- I was delusional to believe God can hold the whole world in His hands.
- My science teacher operated under the delusion that global warming isn’t real because the earth is only 6,000 years old.
- Thinking gay people go to hell is delusional.
- I was so goddamn deluded to think that my teachers, my friends, my parents, my school would love me even if I was gay.
- Is it delusional to think that Jesus loves me, even now?
___________
Growing up, I understood that love was inextricable from punishment. (How could I not, when the Biblical narrative relies on God killing his own son?). When I was sent to the principal’s office in third grade and spent the night on our living-room rug begging my father for forgiveness through a mouthful of decade-old fibers, I understood that he only did this because he loved me. When my school’s guidance counselor interrupted the summer before my senior year to talk about the rumors of my queerness, I knew her promise to expel me came from a place of love. I had spent the previous decade learning that hell was created for people like me—queers whom God loves too much to tolerate; sons and daughters born to die. As I spent nights under the warm glow of my bedroom’s languishing ceiling fan asking the Bible how I could become straight again, I understood that I was searching for answers that didn’t want to be found. I often heard hell described as the absence of God. But what if hell is where all of God’s unused love lives?
___________
In the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar is plagued by a nightmare about the destruction of a large statue, made of precious metals. The prophet Daniel tells him this dream foreshadows the day God will put to end all the kingdoms of the earth. So, when my sleep is punctuated by nightmares about ruin: visions of women, death, my mother’s wrath, sex, anger, crucifixion, crying, and suffocation, I know what God is telling me.
Of students who attended church regularly for at least a year in high school, the vast majority no longer will once they get to college (according to a 2017 study from Lifeway Research, a notable Christian organization). Outgrowing church seems to be a common plight for Bible-burdened teenagers, but how many of them are successful at outgrowing religion itself? How many of these teenagers can recite all sixty-six books of the Bible but still tremble when they pick one up? How many of these teenagers think about gay sex during church services to tune out another recitation of God’s story of salvation? How many of these teenagers gave so much of themselves up in the pursuit of eternal life, they couldn’t tell you who they are if they tried?
___________
Even though my high school was so new it smelled like paint on the morning of my freshman year, the ceiling leaked. The eco-friendly bathroom lights often refused to turn on, so I peed in complete darkness. Sometimes, it smelled so much like rotting sewage that the doors were propped open all day as a silent prayer for the fat, flamboyant summer breeze to purify the halls. In the Bible, physical opulence is often juxtaposed against moral decay. King Nebuchadnezzar built up the great kingdom of Babylon, only to have it crumble into pieces after his death. I like to imagine God pinching this City of Light between his thumb and forefinger—resembling a grain of sand in hands big enough to hold the space-time continuum—and plunging it into eternal darkness.
___________
I wrote this because I was angry.
I’m still angry.
I think I will probably always be angry.
Because whenever I creep past a church, I can taste the syllables of a prayer on my lips as I imagine meeting God between fabric-trimmed pews again. The Bible still holds an unnerving fantastical, mystical power. I’m comforted by the stories of kingdoms rising and falling, of Christ’s unfathomable love, of bitter pain, of the breaking of bread—the breaking of man. I relish in the sliver of peace offered by the Christian melodies that unexpectedly play from my shuffled music. Lately, I long to spend another hour with God in a darkened auditorium or dusty bedroom or religious science textbook. And yet, I still refuse to be anything but angry.
I’m angry because I want to leave religion, but religion won’t leave me.
I’m angry because the beauty and intricacy of a 2000-year-old faith has been permanently tainted by one school’s idea of God.
Because I want Christians who hate religion and love God.
Christians who have found salvation in the fabric of women’s bodies and in the folds of the Bible.
Christians who spend an hour every other week in therapy learning how to stop punishing themselves.
Christians who worship science and believe in evolution.
I want Christians like me.
COLL 101: The Art of Loneliness
Fall 2021
Course Description
This course is designed as an initiation into failure, loneliness, guilt, despair, and anxiety colloquially known as “the best four years of your life.” When students arrive on campus, they will find everyone seems to have made friends over the summer without them. They will attend their first college party and remain sober the whole night. They will call their mom sobbing and board a plane back home 48 hours later. They will flounder in first-year courses, although no prior knowledge is explicitly required. They will not know what to tell strangers who ask where home is. This course will expand on the burden induced by a student’s elementary and secondary education. Students will learn to synthesize information in order to critically analyze whether college is really meant for them after all.
Required Materials
- Fear of the dark, parties, and the dining hall between the hours of 5 and 6 PM
- Chronic stomach pain that doctors assure you is “nothing to be concerned about”
- An unfounded belief that things will get better
Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes
- Students will leave this course with the following:
- Stories of a freshman-year roommate that will haunt dinner parties 10 years from now
- An incessant craving for coffee: strong and black
- An album whose sound is just as oppressive as the Houston heat
- A dead grandmother they can’t stop crying for
- A degree in the art of bullshitting
Requirements
Throughout the duration of the course, students must complete the following:
| Assignment | Point Contribution to Final Grade | Expectations |
| Find faith in anything but God | 40 | Outgrowing religion is just as inevitable as outgrowing nightlights, stuffed animals, and the Tooth Fairy. |
| Call home once a week | 25 | Calls should only last long enough to say everything is fine and “I love you too!” |
| Learn to lie when asked how they are doing | 20 | Appropriate answers include: “Just fine, and you?” “It’s Monday,” ”It’s too hot today,” and the obvious, “I’m just tired.” |
| Fall asleep alone, night after night | 15 | This feeling may grow easier to bear, but it will never disappear entirely. |
Course Policies
Late Work
- You will complete this journey in your own time, but please note that late work is not accepted under any circumstances.
Grading Policies
- Students are reminded that their final course grade is not indicative of their inherent worth, but useful if the student wants to maintain good academic standing, see their name on the Dean’s List, be accepted to law or medical school, graduate in four years, participate in research, be eligible for postgraduate programs, obtain letters of recommendation, find a high-paying job, and avoid pissing off their parents.
- If you feel you have put in as much effort as possible, put in more.
- Please do not ask any questions about your final grade, because really, you deserved to fail.
Attendance Policies
- Class attendance is mandatory. You will come to class sick, sobbing, heartbroken, hungry, exhausted, alone. Office hours are not mandatory, but good luck completing assignments without attending them.
Honor Code
Did you really think getting accepted to college was the hard part? If this course feels impossible to complete without engaging in some form of academic dishonesty, perhaps you are one of the ‘weed outs.’ Students should always abide by the following university-sanctioned honor code:
On my honor, I promise to glorify this institution at all costs.
My Body, My God
When I planned my visit to a psychic, I expected to meet a pale, dark-haired woman in a cloud of intoxicating incense, whose spindly fingers would creep over a glowing crystal ball and tell me about my dismal fate. So, when I walked into Elaine Palmer’s office, I was pleasantly surprised by how modern and inviting the pale gray walls and neat eggshell bookcase were. Her glass-topped desk was covered with a sprawl of glass jars filled with milky-pink crystals and light-green jade bracelets, a haphazard pile of yesterday’s mail, and an oddly welcoming array of gold-trimmed tarot cards. Nestled between the mysticism and mystery lay a too-familiar object: a pink Bible emblazoned with a cheap rhinestone cross. I guess Google was about her being a Christian, I thought, as I sat down in high-backed chairs not unlike those in my grandmother’s dining room. There was no time for introductions as Elaine sprayed my palms with an odorous green liquid that lingered in my nostrils for days, gathered the tarot cards in her right hand, and instructed me to make two wishes and hold them in my left hand. And with that, she proceeded to tell me my fate.
I am generally indifferent about the mystical, the mysterious, and the spiritual. I want to think angels are what my grandparents are now, ethereal and eternal. I hope more than anything their spirits are endowed with omnipresence. If I close my eyes, I can still feel their hands clenched around my forearm, like I’m leading them across the street one more time—jaywalking into the spiritual realm. And yet I have no good reason to think this is true, because the God I spent nearly two decades loving has been largely silent about the matter. Whatever infrequent conversations cropped up about spirits during my childhood were coupled with a stern warning that the spiritual world was one no Christian should ever become entangled with, not even in novel thrills like Ouija boards and tarot cards. As I awaited Elaine’s revelations, I knew that if my mother found out about this, I would be positively dead.
Elaine asked for my name and date of birth as I shifted uncomfortably in the arching chairs that had initially been a quiet reminder of the grandmother I loved so much. I watched her muse to herself “February….” and waterfall the cards between her fingers. I felt nervous, tired, and stressed as I squeezed my black crossbody bag between my knees. It was the point in the semester where I felt like I was drowning amid hurricane-force squalls. I was deeply unsettled by last night’s nightmare about a creeping paralysis that began in my right arm and trickled its way up my throat until I asphyxiated.
I watched Elaine lay the cards on the table, each one making a soft, satisfying thunk as it hit the crystal-clear surface. She paused after laying them out, as if to give the illusion that whatever their unusual sheen was telling her required intense concentration.
“I see three things in your future: brightness, happiness, and peace of mind,” she rattled off, our eyes glued uncomfortably together. I ignored the panic that creeped through my lungs, and instead nodded my head stupidly, as if her predictions made perfect sense.
She continued to peer into my subconscious. Finally, with a thin, pitying smile, she said “you ain’t been happy in a long time.” I laughed uncomfortably, unsure whether to confirm or deny her assertion. Her use of Southern slang felt incongruous with her slight accent that twisted around her words and spoke to her Egyptian Indian heritage. I could feel a cold sweat seep out from underneath my arms as I remembered all of the hours I spent politely listening to my therapists offer professional advice about my obsessive desire for control.
What followed next was a series of unremarkable predictions about future career success, one fulfilling marriage, and two children. A sickening headache wrapped across the front of my forehead, its grip strengthening with every uninspiring utterance that reverberated around the room. I wasn’t sure how Elaine defined success, but I knew I wasn’t comforted by the fact that I would get there sometime in the future. And yet, Elaine was able to pick up on the loneliness I refuse to reckon with, so maybe this is the part of the story where I should be convinced by her claims. Or maybe, Elaine is just the type of person who is better able to read the subtleties of body language, facial expressions, and yes, auras. Maybe Elaine really does have a gift. And maybe it’s not my job to decide.
After Elaine had exhausted herself and me, I pointed to the pink Bible that had seemed to keep a watchful eye on our conversation. “Are you a Christian?” I accused, more than asked.
Elaine told me she was Catholic, going on to elucidate that “We all believe in God; we all believe in Jesus.” I decided it was not appropriate to point out to her that Houston, while largely Christian, has a rather expansive population of Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists who might disagree with her. Some days, I disagree with her too.
“I don’t—I’m not anything,” I responded, unsure of how much information to give Elaine about my uncomfortable relationship with religion. Finally, I added, “I was raised in a Christian home.”
She nodded slowly and quietly. I watched her hands move frantically, almost helplessly, as she explained that there were “many flavors of Christianity out there for me to explore.” I felt certain she was dead-wrong about me ever returning to any version of Christianity, but I kept my mouth shut. Apparently intrigued by my spiritual dilemma, she asked “Have you ever been baptized?”
“When I was four,” I nodded.
She shook her head immediately, unsatisfied with this answer. “You didn’t know what you were doing.” I laughed, genuinely this time, pleased by how she didn’t look at me and see the atoning Christ, strung out on a cross. I liked that she questioned the power of those salvatory words, “I believe.” I could see myself coming back here, I thought, thankful for the way Elaine had managed to relieve me from the tension wrought by my deeply religious upbringing and current apathy towards any and all things religious. Later that night, I found myself unsettled by the way Elaine straddled the line between the forbidden and the righteous, between the spiritual and the religious. Days after our encounter, and most troubling of all, I found myself looking for God again.
I decided to seek the counsel of Danielle, a recent graduate with a degree in religion and intern in Rice’s Baptist Student Ministry. I cared about understanding Elaine, but I cared more about understanding myself as we crouched over a lopsided table in the student center, surrounded by a dying lunch crowd. I spun a sports drink bottle—that day’s lunch—slowly in my hands, my nervous leg shaking the off-center table as Danielle told me about Haitian Christianity, Christian Mysticism, and Catholicism in an effort to justify Elaine’s dichotomous beliefs. I tried to untangle how I felt about us all communing with the same God. I think I would have preferred for Danielle to tell me there was only one version of Christianity—one version of God, so I could finally close myself off to Him completely.
Though respectful of its origins, Danielle disagreed with the role of mysticism in a Christian’s life. “The way I see it,” Danielle said, “why would I try to control a situation, when I can just give it to God?” I wanted to tell her it was because the cross was too small to hold the weight of my queerness. I wanted to tell her the only salvation I had found was in controlling myself, in controlling my body, and in controlling my God. Instead, I said nothing at all.
I wanted Danielle to tell me there was an end to my religious haunting when I asked, “Do you think God will ever stop pursuing me?”
“I think God is eagerly awaiting your return,” she said tenderly. Somehow, her compassion hurt more than the Church’s wrath ever had. I bristled as she launched into the story of the prodigal son, thinking my god, I know all these stories by heart. And yet, the way she described the father waiting among the hilltops, night after night, watching for his son, wrecked me in ways it never had before. Because now, when I close my eyes, I can see my Father waiting to carry me home.
I wanted it to be easier than this.
I wanted there to be a clear answer to my questions about leaving God, loving God, and loneliness.
I didn’t want Danielle to apologize for the ways the Church has hurt me.
Today, that apology feels like enough to bring me home.
Tomorrow, I know it will not be, when I wake up to the shallow glow of 5:30 A.M. light pollution. I will stand shirtless in front of the mirror and try to remember what my body looked like yesterday. I will lift weights. I will run on the treadmill. I will put every bite of my breakfast into MyFitnessPal, then delete the app. By lunch, I will find myself counting the calories in a ketchup packet. I will spend the afternoon in a stubborn spiritual and physical hunger. I will come back to my dorm room and eat half of a sandwich. Then I will eat the other half. I will suck the salt off almonds from a bag of trail mix I promise I won’t eat. I will eat the trail mix. I will eat Halloween candy until I feel sick from guilt and the sticky caramel that clings to my teeth, then I will throw the rest of the pile away. I will fight the urge to take the candy back out of the trash can. I will eat single-serve packages of peanut butter, slowly and ashamedly. I will think about God while I brush my teeth and put in my retainers to prevent myself from eating anything else. I will not pray, but I will cry out for salvation from myself, from my body, from its unbearable weight.
After Elaine finished my reading, I left her a 5-star Yelp review. The waving flags of a used car dealership and yellow Shell station signs screaming out too-high gas prices crouched in my field of vision as we prepared for a farewell ceremony to release my negative energy. I now had a milky-pink crystal clasped in my left hand and a jade-green bracelet encircling my wrist, both gifts given for spouting some bullshit about how guided I now felt by her reading of those iridescent tarot cards. We turned to face the window; my purse still clutched precariously between my knees. The only movement on the pockmarked blacktop street that stretched before me was by cars who were turning into the adjacent Church’s Chicken parking lot. We began the drumbeat rhythm together, a mystic and an apathetic, united by the thin sound of fingertips on temples tap–tap–tapping.
“Take a deep breath,” she instructed as I stretched the fragrant air between my nostrils, through my lungs, out my mouth.
“And another.” My fingers danced across my temples, mistakenly grazing my cheekbones as my wrists grew tired. The soft pink stone felt warm in my sweaty palm, and I worried it might slip out of my hands altogether.
“One more and try to hit a little harder!” I glanced over at her, wary about the ritual and even more concerned that I was doing it all wrong.
“Release!” we commanded together, thrusting our hands off our temples, pushing our palms towards the plate-glass window.
Our fingers fell back into step as we moved down towards our cheeks, inhaling, and exhaling three times. I tried harder this time to cast out my negative thoughts. I shut out the ugly urban blight that stretched before me and sucked air in through my nose, hoping hyper-oxygenation might bring me some semblance of inner peace. I pounded my cheekbones, feeling new acne scars that had joined forces with the army of zits lining my forehead. I decided I needed to book an appointment with a dermatologist.
“Release!” Our fingers skipped down to our collarbones. I remembered the way my fingers had wedged themselves into the hollow of these bones as a high schooler, a dysphoric measuring tape for my thinness. I was proud of the way they had stayed visible even as I stepped into womanhood, proud enough to permanently drape them with a variety of necklaces—an eagle in flight, a golden square of teeny-tiny rhinestones, several of which are missing, my late grandmother’s ovalish medallion. I remembered how my arms crossed over these bones—the American Sign Language for love—during off-key renditions of Jesus Loves Me. I remembered how my arms had clung to my chest just before I was baptized into Christ Jesus’s death and raised to walk in the newness of life.
“Release!” We arrived at our rib cages. I unconsciously poked my chest out so I could better feel the intercostal spaces. I remembered the way my ex had poked their finger at my naked chest, laughing as they told me how skinny I was, and how beautiful that made me feel. I think I’ve always been searching for a way to take up less space—to reimagine the confines of my body. I felt exhausted by my obsession with smallness, but too ashamed to ask Elaine if I would emerge unscathed, or even at all, from the disorder that haunts my every waking moment.
“Release!” we triumphed, apparently having exhausted all our negative energy. Her wide-open eyes searched mine. “Now, how do you feel?” I extracted my purse from between my knees, feeling the weight of my war with my body and my God thick on my tongue, on my hips, on my thighs, and made the motions for leave.
“Good,” I lied. “I feel good.”
Lauren Fraley is a sophomore at Rice University from McMurtry College. She is majoring in Mathematics, on the education track, and has a special passion for writing creatively. This portfolio is the product of her first creative writing class at Rice and is focused on exploring the intersection of her sexual and religious identities. Lauren has been published as “Bekah” in the literary journals Body Without Organs and Blue, as well as on Honey and Lime’s Oceans & Time blog. In her free time, Lauren likes to drink black coffee, read entire math textbooks, and leave crossword puzzles half-finished.