The Songs Still Know My Name

I know exactly what John 3:16 says.

I will know it for the rest of my life. I did not choose to keep it. It is simply in there, the way a phone number from childhood is in there, taking up space I cannot reassign.

Nobody warns you about that part.

They warn you about hell. They warn you about backsliding. When I was a girl there was a whole vocabulary for the thing I have done, and every word in it assumed I would be miserable afterward.

Nobody said: you will hear four notes of a song in a grocery store and your throat will close.

It happened in the produce section. An instrumental version, the kind that exists to keep people moving. I got maybe a bar and a half in before my body knew what it was.

My mouth had already started.

Not out loud. Just the shape of it. Twenty years of Sunday mornings living somewhere below language, and the words came up whole while I was standing there holding a bag of apples.

I finished my shopping.

I do not miss the certainty. I want to be clear about that, because people assume the missing is about answers, and it is not. The answers were the first thing to go and I have not wanted them back.

What I miss is smaller and harder to admit.

I miss having somewhere to put it.

There was a mechanism. Something terrible would happen and there was a place to bring it — a posture, a set of words, a room full of people who would say they were praying for you and mean it in the specific way that meant something was being done.

I prayed about it was how we said I made a decision. It was also how we said I have set this down.

I have not found what replaces that.

I have found things that describe it. Sitting with it. Holding space. Processing. All of it accurate, none of it load-bearing.

The habit outlasted the belief by years.

I would catch myself starting. In the car, mostly. Something would go wrong and the first three words would already be out before I remembered there was no longer anybody on the other end of them.

Then the sentence would just stop.

That is the part nobody describes. Not a crisis. Not a dark night of anything. Just a sentence stopping in your mouth in a parked car outside a Food Lion.

Somebody tells me their mother is sick.

I used to know what to say. The words were right there and they were free and they landed every time, because both of us believed something happened when I said them.

Now I say I'll be thinking of you.

The sentence sits wrong in my mouth every time. Too light for what it's answering. I hear myself say it and know it did not do what the other one did.

Sometimes I am in a room and somebody says let's pray.

Heads go down. I close my eyes. I bow my head. I wait.

My hands do not know where to go. I used to turn them palms up. Now I hold one wrist with the other, the way you stand at a funeral.

I do not know how long these last. I never did — I was inside them before. Now I am counting. Somebody's voice does the thing voices do near the end, the small lift, and I get ready.

Then everybody says amen and I do not, and nobody notices.

I still flinch at certain words.

Not the ones you would guess. Not sin. Not eternity. The soft ones. Surrender. Obedience. Saved. Words that were handed to me as tenderness and that I have since had to take apart to see what was inside them.

My son tells me he is a Christian.

I tell him that's great.

What I feel is closer to panic. It arrives before anything else does, low and fast, and the first question it asks is whose voice is that. Which grandparent has been working on him. Who has decided that a child in a godless house is a project.

I bite the inside of my lip and let him talk.

He says grace sometimes when I have not asked him to. He asks me to pray with him and I do.

Yesterday my daughter asked me if I think the devil has a soft spot.

I told her I don't believe in the devil.

She seemed satisfied with that. She went back to what she was doing.

They are being raised by a woman who cannot tell them what she believes, only what she doesn't. My mother handed me certainty and I have spent my thirties putting it down. I do not know what my children will spend their thirties putting down. Only that it will be something, and that it will be mine.

Here is what I have not been able to explain to people who left the same room I did.

I did not lose the longing.

The god went. The wanting stayed exactly where it was, still shaped like a god, still turning toward something at the end of a hard day.

Sunday mornings are quiet now.

Nobody needs anything from me for the first hour. I make coffee. The house is still. Occasionally something in me sits up and starts looking around for where we are supposed to be.

Nowhere.

I drink the coffee.