if I could write on "disbelief"

This whole year has left me with a tattered sense of what is really happening to me and what is not anymore. Sufficiently, it has beat my brain out of my own head. I feel like the lone survivor standing in an entanglement of wreckage, asking one baffled question:  where am I?

            Disbelief is something that has come as natural to me as breathing. Growing up, my parents would be boastful about the skeptical nature that consumed me, ever since consciousness had settled in. When told one year about the existence of Santa Clause, I marched to the fireplace (unlit, thank god) and stuck my head in, staring up the ashy blackness of the chimney.

            “Not possible!” I then declared to my agape parents.

            But now, when my dawn is meeting my horizon, I have been asked yet again to recall faces no longer amongst us. Places that do not exist anymore, in maps and atlases. Words I do not say these days. Mother. Father.

            Anxiously, I wait in an aged wooden pew in my neighborhood church. I have never been a member of this church, but I have frequented it throughout the years. Like another person would dart in and out of a neighborhood bar, to make a not-so-apt comparison.

            I’m not a specifically religious person, but sometimes I need an oasis. And this proves well, in that need. I have entered in the back for rainy masses. I have crept in the side door for overpacked Easter vigils. I’ve come here and simply sat, when I’m more or less certain I was the only living soul in the whole place.

            I wish, after my mother’s death this April, I’d taken her rosary beads. I had let my brother take most of her spiritual possessions. It made sense; he was the minister. “You take it, Henry,” I had said as we stood over her vanity. “Go on.” He acted the little brother; he took it only shyly with his eyes never leaving mine.

            The priest is giving confession here. Sometimes I go to confession. I never tell the truth about how long it’s been between my gaps. I fudge a number, a estimate. “Several months?” I wouldn’t be able to really know. Time blurs so often and I forget. There are several old people waiting in the wings; I am one of them but I don’t think of myself as “old.” I just think to myself:  I am here. That’s where I need to be.

            My mother died after an extended illness. Gave into overwhelming circumstances- who could really blame her for that conclusion? It’s what we’re all left with anyway. God sometimes must sure like twisting it out of people. She died with a look on her face akin to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I thought she might be peaceful at the end, stroking her hand and looking on.

            “What do you see?” I asked her. I had to ask; the need was practically tugging at my pants leg.

            Now, my mother, at that moment. She stared at me with the face of a fearful child. Her eyes were as big and as white as yolks of chicken eggs.

            “I don’t believe anything anymore,” Mother had said, slightly before we took her into the hospital. She was standing in the kitchen, so weak it hurt to look upon her. She was standing by the oven.

            “Okay.” There was no other way for me to address that confession. I am old and so was she, so much older. Like she weathered every storm this desperate planet had to offer.

            Then, she just nodded. A pact was understood.

            The man in front of me rises to go into the confessional. He staggers some, his walk shaky. Then, he slips in, complete in his dusty brown cardigan. He’s utterly unaware of me and that’s the way I prefer it. I wish it was more like that, in the grander scheme of things. But people know my name too well and too often.

            “Are you Anna Crawford?” one woman stopped to ask me in the gym. I nearly grimaced.

            “Yes, I believe I am,” I said hesitantly. I was in no mood for a long talk and judging by her overall demeanor, she was a winded talker. Her eyes were sparkling with almost contagious joy.

            “Oh! I used to love your articles for the Press!” She had to have been about 33.

            “Me too.” And then I kept on walking. Over the years, I’ve become a minor master of such routines. I don’t do a lot of writing anymore. I don’t like to be reminded of the fact.

            So there I was again, in the church, waiting for my turn in the confessional. I never do the face-to-face confessions. Ever since I am able to remember, those have turned me off. Why wouldn’t they? Sitting in front of someone, facing pure judgment?

            The priests are typically younger than me, anyway. And no one likes that.

            “I don’t believe in anything anymore.”

            Henry had given the eulogy, which was ironic if you paused to consider they were never close. He was a problematic child growing up and coming of age gave to a burst of spiritual revelation or the need to cleanse himself, either/or. He told me he had SEEN God in the parking lot of a massage parlor. I wanted to believe (desperately) it was a joke. Or a riddle.

            “I was at my absolute depraved lowest!” he will often tell parishioners. I know Henry means well now, so well, but I am sometimes tempted of the cliché of a travelling con artist when I watch him in action. But at our mother’s funeral, I felt that cynicism erode. To a steep degree. Some vital ingredient he was missing and no matter how many times him and God accidentally bumped elbows, it would never fully be there.

            I will tell you about the several times I believe I met God. You be the judge.

            There was a little girl I saw in front of me in the park, when I was still married to Nick and we were trying haphazardly to have a baby, because that was the most important thing. In fact, if I was the type to conjure lists of importance (and not half-conscious ramblings such as “things that are very wrong with my body”). She stared at me. She stared at me like a condor should stare at a rat scurrying along in the tumbleweeds. Her hair was long and red, pulled back in a strict ponytail. Nick had red hair, the same shade. Which was rather annoying, when it came to tasks such as cleaning the showers.

            She held her mother’s pale hand. The mother was yapping onto the father about school matters, concerns of this teacher and that. Somewhere, a band was playing. But this little girl was not fussed. She just stared at me, with the most extraordinary blue eyes I’ve ever seen on a living thing.

            It’s an apparition. I was pulling at the end of my hand-me-down sweater, enraptured. That could be my child. She even has my chin, my god.

            I have no children. Nick lost interest before it happened. No worries for him, he and Vanessa have three now. I have none. I was 28 then. Needless to say, now my childbearing days are discarded.

            I wish the old man would hurry. He can’t have much to confess, save unless he’s going for some entire life review.

            The other time I saw God was two and a half years later at a traffic stop. I was incredibly angry then, due to work. My editor, to be polite, was a cunt.

            “I hope she chokes,” I was muttering to myself, choking the steering wheel. “I hope she chokes on a clam.” Missy was very allergic to sea food. How I never showed up at her office with fish sticks or a nice piece of fresh cod is beyond me now. Well, a waste of purpose for the fish, I suppose.

            In the middle of my hateful ranting, I just randomly looked out the window. Not much thought going into that. Just glimpsing at the world around me I was sick of then. A man was observing me, I realized, from a neighboring truck. Normally, this would send off all my bells and whistles. Creep, I would think, as a young woman should.

            But there was something about this man’s bright aura I interpreted as peaceful and well-meaning. Seeing him there, smiling at me in the way that was nearly reminiscent of someone with significant brain damage, warmed my soul to its inner workings. I suddenly lost sight and focus of what I had been so mad about.

            Then, the truck was gone. And usually you see them, speeding off into the distance as so. Not so much this time. There was simply no truck anywhere around me, orange paint and peeling, Oklahoma plates. God? Again. You tell me.

            The old man retreats from the confessional now. His cheeks are pink, as if rapidly exposed to blood. He makes his way into the second pew by the candle-lit altars and prays. Gets down on his ancient knees and bows his head. So I’m next.

            “I do not believe in anything anymore,” I say, beginning my approach to the velvet curtain that signals its entrance. I say it to myself as one would, the most sacred of mantras left to them.