I Write Prayers I Don't Believe In
Every night, one page, addressed to whoever is taking dictation.
Every night at eleven, I write one page to a God I broke up with when I was nineteen.
We did not part on good terms. My father got sick the autumn of my sophomore year, and I prayed the way you bail water out of a sinking boat, constantly, with both hands, with deals attached. I offered up my grades, my vices, my future firstborn's middle name. I knelt on dorm room carpet that smelled like old pizza and asked, specifically and repeatedly, for one thing.
In February... we got the other thing.
Faith did not storm out of me.
It left quietly, like a tenant who mails back the keys with no note. One Sunday I realized I had not prayed in a year and felt nothing about it, and that nothing was the loudest sound in the room.
So it surprised everyone, most of all me, that at thirty one I started praying again. In writing. Nightly. To Whom It May Concern.
I would love to tell you it began with a mystical experience. It began with insomnia... and a search bar. Somewhere around 2 a.m. on a bad night, I typed something desperate and landed on a pastel universe of prayer journaling: washi tape, gratitude lists, women with excellent handwriting thanking heaven for their kitchen renovations. I felt superior to all of it for about ten minutes. Then I noticed I had read forty posts and it was 3 a.m., and superiority at 3 a.m. is just longing with a security system.
The next day I bought a plain brown notebook, the cheapest one at the pharmacy, because buying a beautiful one would have meant admitting I was serious. That night I sat on my bed and wrote at the top of the first page: To Whom It May Concern.
The first entries were awful, and I mean that with affection. They read like complaints to a landlord. I itemized. I brought up February of my sophomore year the way you bring up a security deposit that was never returned. One entry was a single sentence: I assume this is going to your spam folder like everything else. I signed some of them sarcastically. Warm regards. Best. Awaiting your reply.
But I made myself four rules, and I kept them. One page, every night, no crossing out, no rereading.
And here is the thing nobody tells you about writing a page a night to nobody: you run out of sarcasm around week six.
You cannot itemize forever. Eventually the page just sits there, patient as a dog, and you have to put something real on it.
So the entries changed without my permission. I started reporting. My sister is pregnant and terrified. The maple on 9th Street went red early this year. I was cruel in traffic today and enjoyed it, briefly. Please keep an eye on the man outside the bank, the one with the good manners and the bad shoes. I did not believe anyone was reading. I wrote as if someone was. I still cannot explain the difference between those two things, only that a life fits in the gap.
The turn came a year in, when I broke my own rule and read the notebook straight through.
Two things ambushed me. The first was that the prayers had gotten kinder, and not toward heaven, toward me. Early pages: demands, evidence, grievance. Later pages: the maple tree, the man outside the bank, my sister. Somewhere in those months I had stopped writing prosecution and started writing attention. Nobody converted me. The page just wore my anger down the way water wears a stone, indifferently, by showing up.
The second thing was worse, or better. On eleven different nights, months apart, with no memory of repeating myself, I had written the same sentence. Word for word.
Let me be wrong about being alone.
I sat with the notebook in my lap for a long time after that one. You can dismiss what you believe. It is much harder to dismiss what you keep saying when you think no one is listening.
Doubt, it turns out, kneels in the same position as faith.
Around that time I read an essay on why safe poems lose, how the poem that risks nothing saves nothing, and I recognized my early entries in it immediately. They were safe prayers. Sarcasm is a helmet. The entries that mattered were the ones where I took it off and wrote the unguarded sentence, and some of those pages, cleaned up and broken into lines, became the first real poems I had written since college. One of them, the one about the man outside the bank, I found by accident while looking through a prompt about strangers, and realized I had already answered it a year before the question.
My mother found the notebook last Christmas. I had left it on the nightstand in my old room like an idiot, and she came down to breakfast with her eyes shining and her hands folded, and said, "You came back." I opened my mouth to correct her, to explain the difference between prayer and practice, between belief and a page.
I looked at her face... I closed my mouth. "I write most nights," I said, which was true, and she squeezed my hand, and I let her have her miracle, because who am I to say it is not one.
People ask me, when I admit to this habit, what I think happens to the pages. Whether anyone receives them. I tell them the honest thing: I do not know who is taking dictation. Some nights the page feels like a phone that was never plugged in... Other nights, and I cannot predict which ones, the room goes quiet in a way that quiet does not usually behave, and the pen feels less like talking and more like being overheard. I no longer need to resolve this. The writing is the closest I come to hope, and hope, I have decided, does not require a mailing address.
My father has been gone twelve years now. I have written him into the notebook more times than I can count, not asking anymore, just introducing him to whoever might be there. Here is the man. He whistled through his teeth. He was wrong about almost everything except people. Handle with care.
The salutations tell the whole story, if you read the notebook front to back. It starts with To Whom It May Concern, all armor. A few months in: Dear Whoever. By the second year: Dear You. And lately, most nights, the entries begin with a single word and a comma.
Dear,
and then the page. The comma is doing a lot of work up there. It holds the door open for whoever might still be coming.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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