Worship  •  Creative Nonfiction  •  December 2023

{1:1} This is a church. It holds people. It holds prayer. The pews are
old and warped from those who’ve sat upon them year after year.
The stained glass is faded, but pretty. Nothing about it is threatening,
but it feels empty, even when it is full. Every sound echoes forever.

When I was younger, I wandered the night in search of salvation. When the dark felt full and deep enough, I’d climb out my window and under the blue-black sky full of stars like grains of salt I’d drag my feet around town until my heels ached. The empty high school football field, the parking lot behind the glowing abandoned cleaner’s sign, the quiet little playground with no one in it – I was looking for somewhere that shimmered, somewhere time slowed, somewhere to worship. Worship what, I’m not sure – I was never religious, nor was I told to be. I was only a girl, and I wanted someone or something to tell me what to do with myself. Churches became my favorite places to frequent on these night searches. Religious sites seemed like an easy answer to my unformed question – my mess of wondering where to go, who to be, what path to follow – and living in the city, there were plenty of them. The nondescript church next to the Taco Bell, the one behind the community pool with the strangely curved roof, the one with the glowing red JESUS SAVES sign that beckoned like a beacon in the night, neon vermillion and unearthly: they all seemed to call to me like far-away mirages, visible but never reachable. I was a nonbeliever – they were never for me. I knew that.

{1:2} This is a church. This church is a bedroom. The bed is white
with four posters. Fake candles adorn the bedside table. There are
torn-out pages from 1960s National Geographics taped up all over
the walls, along with words and drawings scribbled on notebook pages
by someone old enough to understand themselves but too young to
know how to seek understanding. Under piles of clothes, wooden
floorboards stick out at their edges, as do the nails which hold them
in place. This church feels lonely, but alive.

Home was my sanctuary. During my nighttime wandering I felt untouchable, somehow, like daring to be away from my bed at odd hours would keep me safe from harm, but coming home was my real salvation. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but the home I’d constructed for myself within my own room, alone, was the only place in the world that I felt I could be myself. The constraints of the world outside didn’t apply – I didn’t have to be smart, didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t have to be girl – I could just be whatever creature I felt like I was. I relished being alone – but being alone at home in a space of my own was like the finest wine or the most beautiful song: intoxicatingly sacred. Here, good or bad, I didn’t have to avoid myself – I couldn’t avoid myself.

{1:3} This is a church. This church is a bed. The bed is white with
four posters. Someone sleeps here, eats here, sings here, cries here.
Hides here. This church is a home and a prison cell. This church
feels painfully, violently young.

The teenage girl bedroom is a holy space – everyone knows this, I’d assume, even if they were never a teenage girl. There’s a reason countless photographers, filmmakers, and other artists portray teenage girls’ innermost selves through their rooms – girls are so desperate to escape their lives and yet have little to no control, so they construct a sanctuary within what little space they’re allowed. A teen girl bedroom is like a flag stuck into moonrock – an act of claiming, an act of declaring “this may be all that you allow me to have, but it is mine.” But a sanctuary can also be confining. I only truly understood and was understood by myself – this is what made my selfhood beautiful, but it was what ultimately doomed me. I had made my bedroom into my own sacred space, but trapped myself within it, chained myself to my bed. I suffocated myself.

The trouble with finding salvation in oneself and in one’s own solitude is that it puts a lot of pressure on the self. I mean, imagine how god must feel, if you believe in that sort of thing – a thousand voices screaming and begging in unison, all at once, all the time. When you’re your own god – in the way that the most sacred thing to you is the time you spend alone, is the sanctuary that you yourself constructed – it becomes easy to make the self into a martyr. It becomes easy to be self-sacrificing, self-torturous. If it’s easy for some to blame a distant god for all the pain and suffering one feels, it’s even easier to blame oneself. This is how I spent my years as a girl – hiding, self-isolating, biting at myself like a scared animal. I kept the ways in which I tortured myself a secret from those who loved me. I made it my belief – so rigid it became religious – that I was a little hurricane of evil, that if I ever did anything but punish myself for existing I would mess up the balance of the universe and ruin everything for everyone. Crazy, I know.

{1:4} This is a church. This church is another bedroom. On the
ledge below the window, papers are tacked up reading the words
“resentment,” “earlobe,” and “shoelaces.” Next to them are letters
and notes of unknown origin. Ambiguous artifacts. This church is quiet
most of the time. It feels a bit forgotten and abundant in avoidance.
It is full of everything its owner could need, but they seek it elsewhere anyway.

That’s why I try not to be too tied to my own solitude anymore. I have, in some ways, given up on making my bedroom my sanctuary, my place of worship. I try to keep my decorating passive and distant, let my walls be a museum of things from people around me. I surround myself with scraps picked up from the world – post-it grocery lists found on the ground, vintage napkins from thrift stores that once lived full lives with other owners, old bookmarks found in secondhand books. I used to hang up my drawings, my writing; now I don’t put anything on my walls that feels too much like a mirror.

In many ways, too, I have given up on my girlhood – well, not given up, necessarily, but come to view it as something the person I am now was a witness to, rather than a participant. The girl I was is only the faintest part of me now. I remember her like I remember a strange film watched while only half-awake – like it all happened to someone else. It’s easier to be only half-me – only who I am now, not anyone I’ve been. Not anyone more than who I am in the moment. I used to use my bedroom to hide from the world – now I avoid being home at all in hopes of hiding from myself. I will choose any place over my own – any person over myself.

{1:5} This church is a room full of people. A sea of faces; waves
of eyes and teeth and tongues and cheeks, all flushed and vivid with
life. Someone is trying to push through it, fragile as a life raft, in
search of the shore. This church is no place for the lonely, but the
only place to go. This church is like the whole world.

It’s easy to look for god in other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone is. I floated through periods of my life just going where the tide took me, towards anyone whose currents pulled me in. I danced with them, drank with them, ran with them, screamed with them; countless memories of countless people whose faces and names all blur together. Anything to become something else. Anything to stop thinking, stop being. No more time to myself meant no more self. I swallowed other versions of me by the mouthful and vomited them back up again into new friendships, new lives. There are months – even years – of my life that I spent so dissociated I barely remember them. I worshiped distance from myself. I worshiped any moment I could be unconscious. I tried to snuff myself out – did anything I could not to feel my body, hear my thoughts, feel myself breathe. I worshiped only the moments in which I could become so ingrained in the world of others that I was no longer myself. That I was no longer present at all. In a sea of others, it’s easier to avoid thinking about the parts of me I’ve left behind.

{1:6} This church is a set of stairs. It overlooks a rainy street and
infinite houses leading out to a body of water. The houses grow smaller
and smaller in perspective so that the farthest roofs look like pebbles.
It is quiet at night. Across the water, a fire burns on a hill. This place
is for talking. Conversations that are held close to the chest – fragile,
like birds.

Somehow, though, without trying, I found someone who slowed me down, and moments with them settled me into my own body. Someone who enthralled me, who I admired so greatly that I no longer could hate the state of being human, they did it so well – someone who saw me, who with there was nothing I could do but be present. I fell in love; I fell back into reality, into my body, into myself. I calmed, like a gentle sigh.

{1:7} This church is another bedroom. It is always filled with orange
light and the warm body of a lover. Smoke drifts gently into the night
from its open window. Every feeling said aloud still lives in its walls.

Real love feels holy, even at the worst of times. It requires faith, which is crucial, painful, and the greatest gift anyone can give themselves. I believed, at one point, that if I made love the center of my life – romantic love, specifically – I would be satisfied, and my life would feel complete. That I could worship the love I had for the rest of my days and need nothing else. That it would save me – that love itself, as a concept, as an abstract, would save me. But worshiping love itself is like worshiping a god I don’t believe in – the concept of love is abstract and distant and has nothing to do with me. It was just another way to avoid myself. Honest love requires honest work, and honesty with myself; I can’t love someone or even truly be loved by someone if I refuse to let myself exist. No one can see me if I’m always hiding, and no one can love who I really am if I never let them see me. Real love requires that I see myself as I really am – and nothing terrifies me more.

{1:8} This church is a nighttime sidewalk splashed with rainwater,
soaked through to the core of the earth. I drop to my knees and beg
the sky to bring me something. Anything. My feelings are too big to
be human. The pain is bright red and biting. I need to be saved,
I need to be saved, I need to be saved.

It’s like walking in circles. I run to and from myself like a dog playing catch; I am the owner and the beast with the bone in its mouth, tail either thrashing or between its legs, panting and out of breath. I search for salvation and find myself and then find myself to be impossible over and over again until I find the whole ordeal of searching to be impossible in and of itself. I am numb to all feeling like a rock in the river, smoothed down through the years to nothing by the raging currents. I am in limbo with myself, avoiding and then searching for myself, running to and from others, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Through it all, I catch myself looking to the sky for an intervention. Through it all, no matter who or what I’ve staked my faith on, I’ve still had a little bit of hope in the back of my mind that divine intervention is coming, that something will save me, that something will fix all the mess of me, me with my guts strewn all over the world. I keep my mouth shut.

I worshiped my solitude, worshiped my loneliness; I worshiped my distance, my non-existence; then I worshiped others, worshiped my lover, worshiped love itself – I even tried to worship myself. But I never really was my own god – or maybe I was, if god is just a concept. I never believed in myself for what I was; I only ever believed in what I hoped I could be, or what I feared I was. I was only ever a god or a monster – I never allowed myself to just be human. To just be. I didn’t know how. I still don’t.

{1:9} This church is silence. The sound of the air, of physical space.
Of witnessing everything and nothing. Of stillness.

I want to say I’ve concluded my search for salvation, but I’m not sure I ever will. There will always be a part of me that’s desperate to be saved by something. But I can say now that I know that part of me. I let it exist – I don’t try to snuff it out, ignore it, run from it.

There are parts of me that are terrified of myself. I let them in, too. The part of me that lives off of the glory of love; the part of me that thrives in the crowd, that loves to be immersed in the lives of others; the part of me that wants to avoid myself, run from myself, pass the time with distractions; the part of me that hates myself, that tortures myself; the part of me that still searches for holiness in traditionally holy things, statuary and church architecture; the part of me that feels too old and overgrown; the part of me that’s young and small and scared, just a girl. I let them all stir and sway and I carry them with me through life. I ride the bus in silence, sometimes. I let myself fall asleep to the sounds of the world outside, the passing cars, the neighbors, the wind. Everything I am, everything I’ve ever searched for, everyone I’ve ever been – we breathe in together. Wait a moment. Breathe out. Repeat.

{1:10} This church is an empty room. It exists nowhere, but I search
for it like I search the skies for stars each night – in my dreams I dig
through dirt for it, down into the bottom of the earth, but it is unfindable.
It eludes me. It eludes everyone. There is no room, really. No church at all.
Just the emptiness. I breathe in. I breathe out. Repeat.