Reading Matthew in the Fall
Dad’s favorite gospel was John. He made us go to church on Christmas. He could paint and draw and sing and do math, pick up any instrument, play it and play it well. He was funny and charismatic and charming and intense: we’d wake up at least once seasonally to find some “required” houseware missing in Christ’s name and proceed with six months of audacious lack only for it all to end abruptly: what was lost would be mysteriously found or repurchased and the era was not to be spoken of again.
Dad’s biggest hook was heaven. His biggest fear was that his kids would grow up and stop biting. I don’t know what his second biggest fear was, if he had one. I don’t know if that’s something people count, if fears are the kind of thing that wait to inch into the top spot upon the occurrence of their predecessors. I don’t know what makes someone a good daughter or a bad daughter, how muddy that in between gets, but I know my hazy faithlessness is the one cardinal difference between the two of us that Dad lacks any capacity to forgive, so I have to speak of him in past tense; sleep and wake up and keep grieving.
So it’s my second year of college, October, one of those gawky fall days close to seventy but cloudy enough to consider throwing on a sweater, if it’s worth the possibility of having to lug around a sweater. I’m reading the Bible despite previously swearing that I’d never go back to that–my rebellious phase has come and gone. I figure I remember enough of it that I’ll be obnoxious in class anyway, I’d best just do the damn thing. So I march through the Old Testament, through September, through my rage at realizing what this book says with farsight. I think at least a couple times a week about calling Dad and asking why. I never do. And if you were to ask me if I was nervous to get into the gospels maybe I’d have laughed but I think I’d also recognize that there is something about the thing that saved Dad but couldn’t save me that might make it all less of a trudge but somehow still much harder to get through.
I opt out of a sweater. The warmth on my back has not yet reached my arms. I’m reading Matthew. It has to have been five years by now, and that, to me, is crazy. Five years since I left the church. I can’t tell you how long it’s felt like but five would never be the number I’d give. There’s a sort of hollowness that comes with the realization of passing time. I thought I’d have a more definite answer by now about religion–deep down I think a part of myself is still holding onto the idea of being a prodigal daughter. Everyone comes to Christ eventually, right? We’ll never understand divine timing? Five years and I’ve wobbled in and out of churches as quietly as I attempted to tiptoe out of the first. Nobody wants to be made an example of, but there was a point at which I realized that no matter what I did, that’s what I’d become. Now, in a sense, it doesn’t matter what I turn into. My name is a stain on my father’s, and when he looks down, that’s all that he’ll see. Either way, every stretch of time that passes between my sporadic church visits makes me feel like I’ve lost more and more of a language I used to be fluent in. I don’t go for God. Maybe I’m a shit person for that. I do go every so often still, though, missing Dad.
I don’t know if I believe in God. I don’t know if I want to believe in God. I don’t know how easy I feel about the idea that divine intervention could save mankind at large but couldn’t save me. I’m not unhappy–I’m taking the backroads around stating that I love my family but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t. Maybe I’m missing some glaring poignance, the idea that God is so often what helps people out of their situations, unless their situation comes with some relation to his name.
Matthew’s the most hellish of the gospels. I don’t think I ever realized that. I don’t know if I’m any more or less afraid of holy fire than I was as a child. I stayed and faked it for a really long time because I did not want to go to hell. I consider going back to all of it sometimes because I do not want to go to hell. For whatever reason, it’s just so easy to believe in hell. There’s something so nauseatingly jarring reading about being eternally burned when the words are coming from what should’ve been my childhood hero. I find that Matthew makes my stomach churn with the sort of remembrance that shouldn’t be let surface. It probably shouldn’t scare me as badly as it does. The idea should come as naturally as my own name– I’ve always believed I am going to end up in hell.
Dad’s been confident in his salvation for a while. Right now, I’m trying so hard to save myself. Dad wants me to go to heaven but I just want to go home. Our difference will always make it be that I shouldn’t. I like to think that even when I was little, I knew. It’s some kind of comfort to feel like there wasn’t ever a time when I didn’t have some keen idea that my whole religious facade was temporary. I knew I was leaving. I don’t know what I thought it’d look like, if it would be this isolating. Who do you lean on when you’re grieving the people you’re supposed to lean on the most? God and I have a past to let lie, but I spend more time thinking about Dad than not. He’ll always be my favorite and I hate that. I hate how awkward all of this is to shoulder. New friends will catch me on a rough day, many have tried to be of comfort. They get it, they lost their dad too. I lost Dad to an extent, sure, but I feel like an ass when I tell them he’s alive. He is, though, and somewhere he’s embodying an adjacency to greatness that I do not get to know about.
He’s come up to visit twice. He sent me a birthday card this year and I taped it to the wall. I’ve heard he’s on a vegetarian kick but it seems out of character–I’ve thought about asking but he hates gossip and I hate phone calls–something tells me I’m making excuses. Sometimes it might be what I need to do. Only getting to think about him is sad, but at least it’s still rosy.
I learn I cannot read about the crucifixion without crying. I do not cry at books, never got anywhere close to emotional in church, but fresh into my twentieth year with a story I know the ending to, I find myself in the sort of tears that come back throughout the day. I don’t know if I pity Christ, if that’s the right word, but I think to some sympathetic degree I understand him. He didn’t ask for this, but took it as a burden for a father who took everything too far. And did he have any sort of option? Did I? Tonight, my class will reach a standstill on this exact topic, but I will stay wondering what could’ve gone any different. Sometimes I’m curious if it wasn’t really the church that was the breaking point, if maybe Dad and I were so similar that we would’ve had the same non-ending in every universe, every version of ourselves screaming at each other in the smallest kitchen in the world over something that cannot be boiled down to anything more than opinion. I took up my cross, though. Maybe in every universe, we reached the point where it was the only thing I could do. But the last time I ever prayed to God–knowing for certain I was praying to God–I was praying for Dad. Jesus came back in three days raving about his father and I bring up Dad nearly every chance I get. I do not remember that I should be angry. Matthew ends abruptly. It feels fitting.
I wander aimlessly for a while, through my campus, through my city. I listen to the same song on repeat. The idea of skipping class rattles itself loudly around my mind but I also know that’s out of character. I’ll go. I want to settle down somewhere and think and re-read Matthew, but I don’t. Damn freshmen in my cry spot again.
I’ve been waiting five years to find some sliver of anything that isn’t this, and I will keep waiting through more. I feel as though I can’t move back, can’t be here or any other city or any other school, join any one church or be openly against it, but I’m at the age where it feels childishly gaudy to think about it all too nihilistically over and over again. I think what I really want is to take a nap in someone else’s bed. They don’t even need to be there. I just need to smell anything but my own perfume on the sheets. I want to find one thing that makes me feel the same excitement as walking into church with Dad on Christmas Eve as a child, hand in icy hand. I’m waiting for some new enigma who can so effortlessly turn the whole world into theirs to the point where I can blur all my focus and morph into something tertiary. I want someone to stick around. And maybe that’s all just some sort of minor god; if it is, I don’t know why I’ve done wrong. I don’t know what this hurt has done to Dad and I both. I’ve stopped myself from trying to grasp it for better or worse because I am scared, and I know he is stronger, and I know it broke him. In the end, I guess that knowing may be my biggest fear come true.
In the end, we broke each other. That’s probably the whole point.
Dad always said he liked John because of its portrayal of Jesus’ strength. I will keep reading Matthew even after our class finishes with the gospels because it feels, to me, the most real. Truth is, I still cannot define this vast emptiness. I don’t know if it stems from a need to find God or if I’m just mourning my belief in him correctly. I have my anger and I have my hunger, but tonight I will not fix either. I will go home after class, turn the lights on just to turn them off again. I will drink what’s left of the prosecco straight from the bottle. I will turn off my phone and lock my own door. I will keep wondering if there is any way to fight fire with fire.
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Footnotes:
Hey guys, it's been a while :) The past few times I've come on here and posted I've also given a general life update so that's what I'm gonna do here too. Going to also try and keep it short but who knows how well that will work--point is though, if u don't know me well or even just don't really care, the essay is over and you can totally stop reading now, no worries at all.
For the rest of you: I just finished my sophomore year of college!! Omg. Does NOT feel real. This year felt like it went by in a blip. Highlights are: threw a rager for my 20th, dated a woman, broke up with said woman, came out (because of a Young Sheldon episode that was a bit too convicting), un-came out, realized who my real friends are and who they aren't, ran away to NYC without telling anyone, took ten shots in seven minutes, signed a lease, and was made editor in chief of my school's literary magazine (holy shit.)
This was published in the latest issue of that literary magazine--my training issue. The prior editor who was training me planned the issue and had space carved out for a Riley Ferver essay but I hadn't submitted anything nor did I really think I had anything to submit, but the night before spring break my friend Alexandra came over and we started going through each other's writing and she fell in love with this--I'd written it in November and promptly forgotten about it. She used the "please...I'm graduating soon and I'll want this" and voila, I said whatever and gave it to Allyson to put into the mag. Tldr I'll do anything for my friends I guess.
About a week ago, after the issue release party I woke up about 2 hours after falling asleep and checked my phone to find messages from a ton of people about the essay, most movingly from a senior girl on my floor I'd never even talked to. She said this essay made such an impact on her and she knew I was probably not up but she'd love to talk about it if I was. Five minutes later, we met on the balcony and stayed up until sunrise just hanging out. I never really think of my writing having an impact but it did this time--and it made me a new friend. That was one of the best nights of this year, hands down. No chance you'll ever see this, but here's to you, Carrie.
Anyway, all this to say I know it sounds horrible but I've been riding on knowing I'm an ok writer for a while now. This piece that I still don't even know if I like reawakened something I hadn't felt in a while, though--connection. With that, I hope you find it too, in this or in something else. Feel free to start conversation below, I'd love to chat (mainly because packing is lame but also because I miss you all.) See you in...what seems to be my average, another year?
XX- RKF