God and I Are Not on Speaking Terms
We had a falling out over an unanswered prayer, and I'm still hurt.
God and I stopped speaking on a Tuesday in March, in a hospital corridor that smelled like disinfectant and someone's abandoned coffee. I remember the exact tile I was standing on when the doctor came out, because I have gone back to that tile in my head maybe four thousand times, and it never changes color.
My sister Noor was twenty-six. Leukemia, second relapse.
For eleven months I prayed the way you are taught to pray and then, when that produced nothing, the way you are absolutely not taught to pray. I bargained like a man at a border crossing with contraband in his suitcase. Take my job. Take my savings. Take four years off my life, I did the math out loud, four for four, she gets to see thirty and I skip whatever was waiting for me at sixty-eight.
I quit smoking as a down payment. I gave money to a shrine I had mocked at nineteen. I prayed at 3 a.m. on the cold bathroom floor because someone told me prayers travel better in the last third of the night, as if heaven had off-peak hours.
She died at 4:17 in the afternoon while I was downstairs buying a samosa I did not even want.
That was the falling out.
Not a loss of belief, nothing so tidy. Atheists get to walk away from an empty house. I walked away from a house with the lights on and somebody home who would not come to the door. There is a specific humiliation in that, the humiliation of the ignored, and it turned into anger so fast I never saw the seam between them.
My mother said it was God's will, and I nodded, because you do not argue theology with a woman burying her daughter. My aunt said we were being tested, and I thought, tested for what... we already failed, the test is over, somebody grade it and let us go home. At the funeral I stood when everyone stood and let my mouth stay shut, and the silence in my mouth felt like the only honest thing in the room.
After that I got petty, the way you only get with family.
I stopped saying God willing. I would say, see you Thursday, full stop, daring the universe to make a liar of me. At weddings, when the prayers started, I developed a sudden and urgent need to check on the parking. When people said I will pray for you, I said thank you the way you thank someone for a gift you plan to leave on the train.
Six years of that.
It is a long time to sulk, and I want to be clear that I knew I was sulking. Anger at God is a strange possession. You cannot report Him to anyone. You cannot unfollow Him. You just carry the grievance around like a stone in your coat pocket, and some days you touch it to make sure it is still there... and it always is, and there is a sick comfort in that.
My grandmother caught me.
Ninety-one years old, cataracts, could not hear a doorbell, and she caught me like a shoplifter.
It was the last winter of her life. I was visiting, peeling oranges for her because her thumbs had given up, and she said, out of nothing... You still talk to Him more than any of us, you know.
I said, Nani, I have not prayed in six years.
She smiled at the wall, which is where she smiled at everything by then. The silent treatment is still a conversation, she said. You do not go quiet at a stranger. You go quiet at someone whose attention you want.
You cannot give someone the silent treatment without checking, constantly, whether they have noticed.
I laughed it off in the room and then sat in my car in her lane for forty minutes... not driving anywhere.
Because she was right, and I hated it.
Every time I refused to say God willing, I was addressing Him. Every prayer I ostentatiously sat out was a letter with no stamp. I had not left the conversation at all. I had dragged it into a locked room and kept it going for six years at full volume, and called that leaving.
Re: My Sister
On the sixth anniversary of that Tuesday, I did something I had been avoiding the whole time. I wrote about the grief instead of around it. Everything I had written in those years circled the hole, described the weather over the hole, complained about the fencing around the hole. That night I wrote into it.
The poem came out as a complaint letter. I titled it Re: My Sister, like unfinished correspondence, because that is what it was. It opened with the tile in the corridor and ended with the samosa, and in between it said the things I had been saying to the ceiling for six years, except on paper they stopped sounding like blasphemy and started sounding like what they always were: a man asking someone he loves why they did not pick up.
My hands shook when I finished. Not from grief, exactly. From the relief of finally saying it to His face instead of behind His back.
A friend who had read an early draft dared me to stop hiding it in a drawer, so I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly to prove I was not precious about it. It did not win. It did not need to. Some poems are not for judges. Some poems are just the door of the locked room finally opening an inch.
What surprised me most came after, when I went looking for company and found whole shelves of poems about forgiveness, and noticed that almost none of them were about granting it. Most were about wanting to want to. That is the stage nobody warns you about, the long flat stretch where you are not ready to forgive, you are only tired of the stone in your pocket.
I am still on that stretch. I want to be honest about that, because the version of this story where I kneel at the end and everything is warm again is a version I have read a hundred times and believed exactly zero times.
God and I are still not on speaking terms. Officially.
But here is what unofficially looks like. Some nights, when it rains the way it rained the March she died, I stand at my window with the lights off. From the street I must be nothing but a silhouette. I watch the water run down the glass and I say, out loud, to no one my lease recognizes... I am still not talking to you.
And every time, I hear how that sentence works. I hear that it has an address on it.
Last month I stood there and added something new. I said, She would have been thirty-three on Sunday. You probably know that. The rain kept coming down through the streetlight, gold and endless, like something being poured from a great height by someone with steady hands, and I stayed at the window much longer than a man with nothing to say to anybody would have stayed.
If that is a prayer, neither of us is willing to call it one yet.
But we both noticed. That is the thing about a feud with someone who made you. Even the silence is correspondence, and lately mine has started to sound less like a slammed door and more like a door left open a crack, in case somebody who owes me an explanation ever decides to walk through it and start with the word sorry.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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