I Envy People Who Believe
They have somewhere to put the unbearable; I keep holding mine.
My neighbour Fardowsa prays five times a day, and on the worst night of my life I stood at my dark window and watched her kitchen light come on at four in the morning for the dawn prayer, and I hated her a little, the way you hate someone with a roof in the rain.
That was the March my marriage ended and my mother's scan came back with a shadow on it. Two phone calls, eleven days apart. The first one I took standing in the cereal aisle, holding a box of the muesli my husband liked, which tells you how recently he had stopped being my husband. The second one I took sitting on the bathroom floor, because by then I had learned that bad news arrives by phone and it is better to already be down.
I do not believe in God. I want to be honest about that from the start, because this is a story about envy, and envy only makes sense if you say plainly what the other person has that you do not.
Believers have an address.
That is the best way I can put it. When the unbearable arrives, and it arrives for everyone, they have somewhere to send it. Fardowsa folds hers into a prayer rug five times a day. My brother-in-law, who found a church two years after his son's accident, hands his to a congregation every Sunday and they hand it back to him lighter, the way you might pass a hot dish around a table with oven gloves. My mother, facing her own shadow on a screen, said, "Well, I'll say a prayer," the way another woman might say she would put the kettle on. She had a place for it. I stood there holding mine with my bare hands.
That spring I tried to want it hard enough to make it true. I want that on the record too. I sat in the back of an empty church on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon, and it smelled of polish and cold stone, and a woman was hoovering the altar carpet, and I waited for something to descend...
Nothing descended.
The hoover shut off, and the silence afterward was just a building being a building. I tried praying in bed one night, whispering into the dark like a teenager on a phone after lights out... and it felt like leaving a voicemail for a number I was not sure had ever been connected. I even envied people their doubt, which is the strangest part. You cannot doubt your way back to something you never had. Doubt is a lover's quarrel. I was not in the relationship.
The loneliness of it is specific and it has a shape.
It is the shape of everyone else's bowed head at a funeral while your eyes stay open. It is the mourners around you saying words in unison that you do not know, a whole room breathing together while you hold your breath. I have stood in that room. If you have stood in it too, you know it is possible to be lonely in a crowd that would gladly hug you.
Then in June my mother had her surgery, and I sat with her afterward in a ward that smelled of latex and lilies, and I finally asked her the question I had been carrying since I was fifteen. I asked how she did it. How she believed, with everything she had seen, her own mother's long dying, my father's leaving, now this. I expected her to say something serene... I was braced for serene.
She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses, an IV line taped to the back of her freckled hand, and said,
"Who told you I believe?"
I actually laughed, one shocked syllable, in an oncology ward.
"Some days I believe," she said. "Some days I would sooner believe in the lottery. You think I kneel because I am certain? I knelt the whole year your father was leaving and I felt nothing at all... and I kept kneeling." She smoothed the blanket like she was closing the subject... then did not close it.
I do not always believe, love. I just keep the appointment.
I have turned that sentence over so many times it has gone smooth, like a stone you keep in a coat pocket. My mother, the most faithful person I know, was telling me that what I had envied all my life was not certainty. There was no vault of certainty behind her eyes. There was a practice. A time, a posture, a place she returned to on the days it worked and, more importantly, on the days it did not. She was not standing under a roof. She was standing in the same rain as me. She had simply agreed to stand in it at fixed hours, with her hands open, and the agreeing was the whole architecture.
I still do not believe. This story does not end with me baptised; I would not do that to either of us. But something rearranged itself in that ward. Envy needs the other person to have something you cannot have.
What my mother has, it turns out, is available.
So I made an appointment of my own. Four in the morning is when the unbearable does its best work on me, so that is the hour I gave it. When I wake at four, and that year I nearly always woke at four, I do not lie there anymore letting the ceiling interrogate me. I get up, I put on the small lamp, and I write. Badly, at first, the way everyone prays badly at first. I wrote about the muesli in the cereal aisle. I wrote about a hoover shutting off in an empty church. I wrote about the loneliness that stands with its eyes open in a room of bowed heads, and writing it did not remove it, but it gave it an address. One night I typed one of those small pieces onto a community wall for poets, strangers scattered across time zones, and by morning three people I will never meet had left words under mine. One of them wrote, "I am awake at this hour too."
That was all. It was enough.
It was the unison I had been standing outside of, except this time I knew the words.
My mother is two years clear now. She still says a prayer the way other people put the kettle on. Fardowsa still wakes before the birds, and when I mentioned once, embarrassed, that I sometimes see her light, she laughed and said she sometimes sees mine, and had wondered for a whole winter what I was doing up. Keeping an appointment, I told her. She nodded like that settled everything, and it sort of did. I read somewhere, in an essay about healing, that recovery is mostly showing up at the same door until it knows you. I believe that. It may be the only thing I believe.
Last week the rain came in sideways at four in the morning, proper Atlantic rain, and I stood at the window with my tea waiting for the kettle noise to fade, and I saw my own reflection hanging out there in the dark over the street, a silhouette with a lit lamp behind it.
Somewhere out there, I thought... somebody sleepless is looking at this window the way I once looked at Fardowsa's. Let them look. Let them hate me a little, if it helps. The light is on either way.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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