A Sweetness/ A Break-up

I thought I had posted this back in 2015 when it happened. I’m going over some material to put together a new story for a show coming up in a few weeks and thought the best way to start my day would be to lick an old wound and contemplate deep pains I haven’t gotten over. Enjoy. 🙂

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Dear Jeff,

It started with the sunflowers and the card. Well, really, it started when I saw him standing tall as a tree at Pride. He was wearing a sleeveless hoodie, leopard print on the front and mesh in the back, and he had a nautical necklace and sunglasses. He had leopard print duct tape on his boots—his favorite color was leopard print, he told me—; he was the coolest person I’d ever seen. 



I wouldn’t have pursued him, but I’d been drinking, and the excitement of the sunny morning’s march through the streets of Fort Wayne and rainbows everywhere and the glittering Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and even the fever pitch of the fire-and-brimstone street preachers made me think things were possible. I stumbled through some heavy flirting, telling him I loved his shirt and he looked amazing: “You’re like my viking savior from heaven!” I found out I knew his roommates, one whom told me he wanted to be courted. He was so tired of just hanging out with people. 



I decided to court him.



I stalked him on Facebook as we do in 2015 and learned that his interests were as colorful as his personality. He liked strange new music I’d never heard of, artists with names like Major Lazer and Glass Animals. He was Space Age-y and electric. I wrote him a message and said it was great meeting him at Pride. He said that was sweet. I told him I knew his roommates, and he said, yeah, they’re good girls. I couldn’t think of anything witty to say and erased a few message attempts before finally coming out with it: “I think you’re really cool and interesting. Would you be interested in going on a date?” 



He was. 



We met at a mutually favorite bar a few days later and hit it off over his IPAs and my gin-and-tonics. We laughed and told stories and took a walk through the historic neighborhood he lived in. He took me across the train tracks that divide downtown from the Wells Street Corridor and showed me a herd of horses keeping a quiet vigil in the dark, silently coming to see us through the fence and munching grass. He showed me his apartment, the third floor of a nineteenth-century mansion, and I met his cats. I wanted to score points; I sat on the ground to introduce myself to them. 



He came back from the bathroom and I stumbled through an explanation of why “Sex and the City 2” had failed where the first movie had succeeded. We kissed and he told me he didn’t want to do anything else on a first date. We went back outside and he walked me to my car. I found the place on his ear that makes him lightly stomp like one of those horses. 



We had more dates, sometimes at our favorite bar. Once I surprised him with a picnic—I wanted to romance him!—and another time we watched one of his favorite local bands, a psychedelic rock outfit twisting tambourines and guitar riffs in front of explosions of color from an overhead projector. We talked about exes and I knew I wanted to make it official. He was kind and funny, devoted to his friends, a hard worker. Each time I left his house, he remained on the porch watching me leave. I’d blow him a kiss as my car passed his house.



He invited me to the lake with his friends. Late in the afternoon, I stepped off of an inner tube that had been pulled by the boat, and he held me as I shivered. The rain began to pour down; we were soaked. On our way back to town, I cradled his head in my lap in the back seat of his friend’s truck.



So, the sunflowers. He had a patch of them near the porch that couldn’t seem to bloom. One had done so, and he found its severed head on the railing one morning, its stem pulled apart, suggesting it had been a human who’d pulled it from the rest of the stalk and not a small animal. I went to a grocery store after work and bought sunflowers for him, and a silly card with a picture of crying toast. “Without you,” it said on the front, and “I’m toast!” on the inside. I wrote, “Will you be my boyfriend? Circle Y or N” on the inside, and when I gave it to him, I presented him with a pen to make his choice clear. He circled Y, and we went to the restaurant where he works and he treated me to martinis, oysters, and a meat plate. He told me that night when he thought I was asleep that he was going to make me so, so happy. 



I thought often about songs, and when specifically it’s safe to assign a song to a relationship. I would hate to lose one over a break-up. One came on the radio, “Hold Each Other,” that says: “Something happens when I hold him/ He keeps my heart from getting broken/ When the days get short and the nights get a little bit frozen/ We hold each other.” I kept it close to me, wondering when we could share it. 



Shortly after all that, he got an opportunity to cook in the kitchen of an expensive restaurant in town. He loved the work. This would take up four mornings of his week, added to the six days he was already putting in at his original job. I began to wonder how much time we’d get together and railed privately against this thing that he loved so much. We lost hours together here and there. 



One night, I went to see him at his house before heading home. We sat together on his porch as we’d done many nights and mornings before. He was tired from work all day. He leaned his head on my shoulder and I thought about the short cropped hair on the sides and the spike on top. “Um,” he said, like a statement. I pushed him on it, and he told me I wouldn’t like what he had to say. I told him I’d stay up all night wondering if he didn’t tell me, so he told me.



“I don’t think we can date anymore,” he said. “I thought I was ready, but I’m not. I’m not totally over my ex“ and “I think this job in the kitchen could really be it for me” and “we’re different people. I like to go out on the weekends and get crazy, and you don’t, and I’m looking for a partner in crime.” 



I looked at the hospital parking lot across the street while he spoke. Really, though, he’s never kept interest in someone like he has with me, and clearly I’m attractive—I guffawed at that—no, don’t do that, you really are. And I’m hoping we can still get lunch together sometimes and catch up. And when he finished with, “I’m sorry,” I thought of what I wanted to say. I started by saying that I don’t have a lot of experience with dating—you should date more! You should date around, he said. 



“I don’t like anyone,” I told him. 



There were more words. I don’t remember them. But it was silent for a bit, and I stood up and said, “Well, have a good one.” I walked down the sidewalk a bit and he called me back. He hugged me with two arms and I held onto him with one, looking over his shoulder, waiting for him to be okay with what he had just said to me. I pulled away and kissed him on the forehead.



“You’re doing this work because it makes you happy,” I said. We shared a light, last kiss and I walked to my car. I didn’t look to see him watch me leave as I passed. The next morning he sent me a message and said it would be strange not to wake up to a “good morning” text from me, and again he’s sorry, and I should take care of myself. I didn’t say anything back. I won’t until I’m done being mad at him. He’s doing what he needs to do, and I’m glad he’s so happy with his work. But still.

The saying comes to mind: “It’s not about the destination, but the journey.” I’ve traveled from disappointment to disappointment, sometimes stopping with someone who couldn’t love me in the first place, not the way I’ve wanted, and sometimes stopping with someone who just wasn’t right. I don’t have much experience with dating, but I do have a lot of experience with disappointment. I think about all the sweetness: his arms around mine to keep me warm in the rain, kayaks and ice cream on Labor Day, and you know sometimes he even told me his face hurt from smiling too much? We wanted to go to a corn maze in the fall, and take a bike trip on the Rivergreenway before the weather got too chilly. There might have been the zombie walk and then Halloween parties; I wanted to impress him with my own flair for fashion and show him one of my cloth wigs. I had more to show him: that I can be large and loud and colorful, that there’s more I want to do in my life to shock people and make them pause. I have more to give. And I do hope it’s true what he’d said when he came to see my play at Fringe Festival, that he didn’t know me well yet but he was proud of me in some way. I hope he meant it when he said I’m amazing. Some day when I feel better, I hope we’ll still be friends, and that it won’t bother me that he has his life to live. 



There’s the lesson: we all have our lives to live, and no one is owed anyone else’s life.

Why I Decided to March with the Peace Corps in the Pride Parade

Queer people were ostensibly not included in JFK’s vision for the Peace Corps when he gave his famous speech at the University of Michigan in 1961. It wasn’t until much later that LGBTQIA+ people could serve openly, but openness is still relative. On my second day as a trainee in East Africa in June 2012, we were instructed during a training not to come out to our host country national staff, as it might affect our relationships with them and the support we would received over the following two years. During my service, another volunteer agreed to pose as my girlfriend, and I was careful to use she/her/hers pronouns if conversations with friends in the communities where I lived ever went in that direction. 


The support we received as queer volunteers was minimal. We had the session on the second day of training during which we were taught about the real risks associated with coming out in a country where we were illegal, and then we were also able to meet for a lunch hour during the annual All-Volunteer Conference. Friends and I disagree about the possibilities, but logistically, I do believe there was little Peace Corps could do for us. Some volunteers had discussed a weekend in the capital for queer PCVs, but then there was the problem of getting funding approved for a meeting about which staff members couldn’t know any details. As a result, I went through some of the most difficult isolation I’ve ever experienced. 


When allies put it in their own words, they say it must have been really hard not to be my true self, but it went much deeper than that. The relationships I cultivated during service felt very tenuous; I always wondered whether my local friends would still love me if they knew who I really was. The sense memory of those two years in the closet still shocks me; I’m still processing it, and I’ve been back in the States for almost four years now.

A few weeks ago I was invited to march with the Peace Corps in the Chicago Pride parade. This felt like a very symbolic opportunity; I would get to march under the flag of the country where I served and add my voice and body to the pageant of our queer liberation. I had to think seriously, though, about what it would mean to participate. Years into a process of becoming more inclusive, Peace Corps still does have a spotty reputation in regards to its queer volunteers. This includes HIV prevention methods for queer PCVs as well as placement options for trans PCVs. Additionally, queer spaces across the country have often not been open to diversity; the image is one of overwhelming able-bodied cis white maleness. Corporations now sponsor floats in Pride parades as a marketing ploy; they have only begun to accept us because of the money at stake and not because we should have had rights in the first place. 
 So why did I ultimately decide to march?

I’m not marching as an expression of the support I received from Peace Corps as a queer volunteer. As I stated earlier, there wasn’t much to go around. No, I’m not marching as a declaration to other queer people that the tides have entirely turned—they haven’t.
 I’m not marching as a testimony to straight and cis people that the world has gotten warmer for us. Many places have, yes, and in many other places, people continue to struggle and push. But there are many more places where queer people dream of these colorful flags draped in business windows and flying on poles in front of homes, atop stadiums, and in the hands of the crowds I’ll see today. Today I’ll see what many of my queer family may never see with their own eyes: thousands of mouths cheering, thousands of hearts open. No, I will not testify today to the warmth of the world for its queerness. 

For me, today is part of the healing journey I’m still on. Today I march in memory of the shattering of my life across the world. I march in memory of the wreckage around me, my old religious beliefs destroyed to make way for a new world in which my body is not garbage, not a mistake, not an unfortunate kink in the universe. Today I participate in our continual story of coming out: I walk in the sense memory of pressure, the sparkle of new diamonds deep in my core. Today I indulge in the sweet gift of being publicly gay, living in a city with a queerer identity, having friends and co-workers for whom my sexuality is not a curiosity but a description.


Today I march in gratitude to my fellow queer PCVs as well as my allies: my fake girlfriend, my friend who bought me a traditional scarf in the capital because the colorful border almost made a rainbow, and all the PCVs who kept a belief in my humanity and goodness safe for me while I broke apart. Today I participate in my pride, which is precious to me for how hard I have to fight each day to live in it.

Spoken and Written

Not long after my big move to Chicago, I received notification of an open call for pitches for a story show at a prestigious theatre here in the city. The call asked for pitches of twelve to sixteen hundred words around the theme of love. I’ve done a few story shows in the past and have never seen a call for such a long submission before. I emailed the organizer, who told me that, if chosen, I wouldn’t be expected to recite the submission word-for-word; I think they’re most concerned with making sure they can have the highest quality show possible and would like to err on the side of length. I’m welcoming the challenge of combining a spoken art I’ve more recently come to enjoy and a written art which feels familiar and dangerous at turns.

Background: As a theatre major at Ball State University, I was blocked. I didn’t know how to be a good actor. I didn’t even know what being a good actor felt like or how to tell if I was doing it correctly. I still loved theatre and thrilled at each chance to see live actors on stage, and I ached to be one of them. Up to that point, school had always been a matter of reading material, taking tests, and checking boxes, but merging academia with an artistic discipline was an entirely new experience. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between structure and creativity.

At the same time, I faithfully wrote in my Xanga (hello, 2005!) every day and decided to pick up a creative writing minor. This opened my creative doors. I couldn’t understand good actors because they worked imperceptibly, disappearing into the characters they were playing. But good writers gave me something I could almost touch; I could analyze story structure, yes, but also the physical forms of the words themselves, how they were laid on pages to suggest timing, rhythm, and music. I could also understand how my own feelings and experiences could be translated into words. The terrain of written words was varied and bizarre; there was room for Ntozake Shange and Jonathan Safran Foer along with Jane Austen and Mark Twain. And, I believed, there was room for me as well.

In working on this submission, I’ve identified a few key differences between my spoken work and my written work. When I build a story for a show, I work orally from beginning to end. I imagine myself in front of an audience, microphone in my face, and I trudge through. I pay attention to the showing and telling (as a writer would), moments of action, story structure. I also leave room for humor and little asides, trying to predict what will make an audience laugh and fill in gaps for them. I construct the pieces in this way until I have a complete story of ten to fifteen minutes and then tell the whole thing again, this time paying attention to the lags and awkward moments. As a storyteller, I’m upbeat, funny, intense, and direct.

But my process as a writer is more intuitive and vulnerable. I feel my way toward words and phrases with sounds that I respond to; they can be pleasing or haunting. I pay attention to sentences that communicate heft and silence. I believe that the shapes and sounds of written words are just as important as their meanings. As a writer, I’m melancholy and sensual.

I’m given the opportunity to craft a non-fiction story for possible performance and with that comes the challenge of uniting my humor and energy with my gravity and music. But this is what I came to Chicago for, yeah? To come home to myself as an artist?Written words don’t have the monopoly on the bizarre and dream-like; art is a heroic effort to make connections and merge disparate selves.

Carry on and happy Thursday. 🙂

Spring Awakening: a Review

Be advised: this review may contain spoilers.

Nearly ninety years after its first English production in 1917, Frank Wedekind’s oft-censored-and-banned Spring Awakening was adapted into a musical, with music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater. That musical received eight Tony awards in 2007 and went on to be performed worldwide, even coming back to Broadway in 2015 as a bilingual production performed in American Sign Language and English. It has now found its latest home in Fort Wayne, with a production by Three Rivers Music Theatre.

Spring Awakening is certain to garner mixed reactions, and audiences should be advised that this is not typical Fort Wayne fare. Spring Awakening tells the story of a group of teens living in nineteenth century Germany and their first encounters with sexuality. Intellectual atheist Melchior acts as the protagonist, self-assured in the physical changes he’s going through. The “torturous” sex dreams of tragically studious Moritz are played for laughs early in the show. Hints about Haschen and Ernst’s relationship provide a few chuckles as well. However, it doesn’t take long for the quaintness to wear off and reveal the disastrous consequences of this ignorance and repression. The young people of this community are thrust into a world bursting with structure but short on answers, and we see very starkly where the expectations of the older generation lead them.

Thematically, Spring Awakening isn’t the most original show to hit the stage. It pits its young characters against a repressive society, arguing that sexuality is natural and that sexual expression can’t be turned off. This is exemplified most obviously in Wendla, played by Dana Bixler. Wendla finds out at the beginning of the show that her sister has given birth for a second time. Already having started her period herself, Wendla still doesn’t know where babies come from, and her mother is hesitant to tell her. As the show goes on, however, Wendla comes into her sexuality, though we can see she doesn’t understand it. In contrast, Melchior, played by Jayden Cano, is self-assured and confident in his sexual development, and this is where the story feels too simple for me. Wendla’s character arc is complex. She has found her sensuality but is still at its mercy. She changes incredibly rapidly, but remains essentially childlike. I was uncertain, however, what changes Melchior goes through, if any. It’s not much of a leap to identify with him as the voice of reason, and I would have liked to see that, if his beliefs don’t change, then at least he’s somewhat worn down by what they cost.

But, never fear, dear reader. Even if the themes of the show aren’t new, the execution feels fresh. It would be easy for a show that deals so frankly with sexual assault, domestic abuse, rape, and abortion to quickly slide into cliche territory, but the young cast remain committed to their characters through adult situations—nothing illegal, I assure you—with seriousness and humor in turn. If you’ll pardon my French, I never felt like I was watching a bunch of amateurs masturbate on stage (I mean, except for that one song—wink wink). When tense moments happen in the show, the audience is uncomfortable because the moment is genuinely uncomfortable. And when the characters were in rapture (the song “My Junk” for example), I could feel it too. The tension is offset by the beauty of the music, and the dissonance created by the two artfully sends the audience back to the first days of adolescences: our own first crushes, our own insecurities.

The venue itself adds to the freshness. The play is being performed at Wunderkammer Company on Fairfield Avenue, an art gallery and community organizing space. The painted brick walls, metal beams along the ceiling, and even other audience members are visible throughout the show; no attempt is made to cover them up. What we’re left with is a show composed primarily of actors’ bodies and voices. The staging is minimal; set changes are accomplished by moving chairs and shifting lights. There are very few costume changes, and only two actors portray all of the adult characters in the play. When not in scenes, the cast sits at the back of the stage, watching the action.

Vocally, the cast is strongest when singing together, though sometimes individual actors’ solos and spoken lines were difficult to hear. Some of you will recall that Wunderkammer Company is the renovated incarnation of the old Casa D’Angelo restaurant, and its acoustics don’t serve musicals. In that same vein, the unique staging comes with its set of limitations; audience members sitting on either side of the thrust stage may not be able to see a some moments of the play because of the placement of actors’ bodies. Audience members previously unfamiliar with this show may miss some points the story to volume and visibility issues, and that’s a shame. This show is so full of poignant moments that it’s a tragedy to imagine any of them being lost, especially to basic issues of sound and sight lines.

I would list my favorite ensemble numbers, but it’s easier just to write ‘all of them.’ Even with its imperfections, Spring Awakening is gorgeous in its minimalism. I have two recommendations: please buy your ticket, and please buy it as soon as possible. And, if you’re concerned about moments you might miss to volume and staging, get there early enough to sit front and center.

Please note: triggers abound in this musical.



Spring Awakening runs one more weekend. See threeriversmusictheatre.com for more information.

Nihilism

Okay, so, I’ve read what I’ve just written, and I feel compelled to let you know this is not a suicide note. I have no plans to end my life. On with the words:

This recent nihilism started during the first year of my Peace Corps service, when words lost meaning. I felt like everyone was either telling me I was lying about the things happening to me, the rocks, the words, the constant attention, the garbage, the screaming, the threats–these things are normal, or they’re only being done by people who don’t know any better, and now that you know why, doesn’t that make it all better?–or they weren’t listening. Or I couldn’t tell anyone, conscious of the covert extra listeners over the phone, their clicks as quiet as mice. We invented code words for ourselves, lest we be overheard in public; you never could be sure who might send you home for an unwise word against… There was nowhere to go, I felt, where I couldn’t be heard, couldn’t be found out if I wasn’t careful. When I came home, there was no one to understand my grief, the loss of a language I’d loved as much as I could, my lingering fear, my craving for cigarette smoke, or the dream I’d just woken up from. There were no words for that, and I wish I’d been smarter and stopped talking.

No, this recent nihilism didn’t start halfway across the world, four years ago. This recent nihilism started in an online support group for gay Christian men trying to live out a traditional sexual ethic. Frankly, we were terrible to each other, living out the love exemplified for us by a God whose mercy was borne out in violence: my body and yours, tools of the devil, our tickets to hell, our means of bringing about apocalypse. It started in the perversion of language in those messages: men healed from their homosexuality barebacked their way across the world, ‘gay’ was only a description of how faggy you were, how femme, and the worst thing to be was effeminate. I believed in those days there had to be a way to tell my story, give my testimony, say the right magic words to take away the abomination my skin was. I smoked cigarettes to burn parts of myself away, I really did, as though queerness was something I carried in pink lungs or a soft heart.

Peace Corps was like taking crazy pills and my ex-gay years were a mindfuck. It took living in a country where homosexuality was illegal for me to understand that no one should live this way. It took people telling me that those things were wrong for me to believe it; I had no instinct for self-preservation. I learned from Jesus to idealize obedience unto death, even death on a cross.

I struggle to organize my thoughts; as I’ve said, words lost meaning. I have no common language with the straight Christians I know, those for whom something like homosexuality is an issue we can disagree on. (I don’t think you affirm my humanity. I really don’t. Yes, you. How could I, that summer of 2011 when I knew it would have been better had I never been born, and 2008, when I’d had to decide between taking a vegetable knife out to the beach to stick in my arm and doing the dishes. No, no, these stories will not sway your hearts, and why should they? You don’t even believe in damage.)

I write these things out of fear for the future and of certain destruction and, perhaps, no existence after death. We get one shot, and no one gives a shit.

There is only language to approximate truth, and language is sadly faulty.

What is left for me is to do what most adults probably do when they’re younger than just-shy-of-31 and think about what it is I need and how to get it. What it feels like is I need certainty, and, if there’s no certainty outside me, I need certainty inside. I want certainty again: of words, of feelings.

One certain thing: Christianity has been very, very bad for me. A smarter person would have stopped a long time ago. I’ve tried very, very hard, and, if God is real, I hope He understands that when I die.
Another certain thing: I’m devastated to have lived and believed such a false thing–I’ve sucked down poison, believing it was nourishing me.
A third: I’m no lighter for having seen what truth there might be. I’ve only woken up from a dream.
A fourth: I live in the wrong place and have grown up largely among the wrong people.
A fifth: I left for the Peace Corps in 2012 and never came home.

There may be no life in four years, or there may be. We may not make it out, or we might. And after that?

A sixth certain thing: I don’t want to be alone, but sometimes I don’t know how people could be anything else.

A Question and a Response/A Testimony

A conversation on Facebook about the wider problem of people who are different becoming the enemy: I chimed in a few times, saying the following:

“marginalized people haven’t been listened to, and people who are not marginalized believe that they are. people for whom the stakes are high must be louder and louder to be heard, and people for whom the stakes are low believe the stakes are high. language fails if no one is listening.”

And regarding instances of Christians disagreeing with queer people’s lifestyles:

“in my opinion, even the word ‘disagreement’ can be faulty; it supposes that each side is on level ground with the others. ‘disagreement’ has been the word to shut me down when i’ve tried desperately to tell people how wrong things have gotten in my life. ‘disagreement’ supposes that no one has been wronged.”

The writer of the original post is a thoughtful person and typically uses his Facebook feed to ask larger questions about human nature. So he asked me:

“Why did people want to shut you down?”

And I wrote the following words, words I haven’t put together in such a long string because it’s difficult to operate in the age of failed language:

“i attribute it again to shortsightedness. i’ll take “i disagree with your lifestyle” as an example, not to go after j—, because i don’t know him and i’m sure he’s a good friend to those who do know him, but because that’s one of the most stark examples in my life. and j—, i do hope if you read this that you know i’m coming from a personal place of wanting to tell the truth and connect; these things are hard for me to tell a christian stranger.

“i was ex-gay for a number of years, but, in that time, i learned that what i was actually doing didn’t matter. i was more sexually pure even than most straight christians, but still, assumptions about my life and what i was doing were out there. and i’d hear that from people who didn’t know me: “i disagree with your lifestyle.” i wasn’t doing anything wrong. the support i actually needed at the time had very little to do with resisting temptation and everything to do with how desperately lonely and miserable i was. and “i disagree with your lifestyle” was a clear indication that there was no room for the actual devastation occurring in my heart to come out. “i disagree with your lifestyle” really meant “i don’t know you personally, but that doesn’t matter.”

“the cognitive dissonance was staggering. time and again throughout my life i was held to this incredibly high standard i couldn’t possibly reach. i was being required constantly to reject my nature, feel out of place among queer people and straight people, and heap grace upon people whose unfortunate ignorance about my misery was absolved by the word ‘disagree.’ and i knew this was what jesus wanted, this grace in the face of repeated psychological abuse, and i was so willing to give it to him; it was all i could give him, it was everything.

“when i was twenty-five i finally realized this was going to kill me quite literally. i started to think again and again that it would have been better if i’d never been born. there was hell for me on earth or hell for me after death. and that, too, was covered by the word ‘disagree.’ this is how i was shut down. it couldn’t possibly be true that there was no room for that level of misery to spoken to, healed, or at least soothed in my local congregation or the people i was closest to. but there it was. the rights of those around me not to feel uncomfortable with this blip in creation, to see me saddled with a terribly heavy burden that would crush me again and again and never have to or be able to carry it, were more important than my right to be understood.

“and then a few years after that, i had step away from the whole thing, because, if God exists and he’s the same jewish-christian God i learned he is, he can’t possibly prefer me dead.

“that’s the ‘disagreement.'”

So many of these pearls are cast before those who don’t recognize what they are. Our points of hardness, the things that have been caught just below our skin and covered time and again to become beautiful: we spit them out, no longer willing or able to live with the irritation, and they fall at the feet before someone who’d just as soon trample them into the mud. And this is often involuntary; so many people have attributed the trampling to malevolence when, really, I believe that no one can see well enough. So we go on, spitting out our pearls, leaving a constellation of opalescence, and still nothing to be divined.

I’ve written these things in rebellion against the failure of language. It cannot be valuable to ask someone who simply can’t see well to name the stars. I must daily choose to be on my own side.

i would like an exchange of words please to switch ‘should’ with ‘would like to’ for example ‘i should stop believing that if god exists then he is evil’ becomes ‘i would like to live my life in such a way as to reflect a belief that everything isn’t a trap’ and ‘i should write every day’ turns into ‘i would like to go back to a place of sensitivity where i was vulnerable to the beauty of words where even their sounds linked together like the bases of amino acids to make eyes deeper green than i’d ever seen before and skin smooth and bronze’

having grown up in wonderland

having grown up in wonderland

i can tell you about the rabbit holes

and root systems wrapped in soil
and how soft water hardens over time into stalactites dripping in slow motion from the stone above.

i can tell you about the cool hardness of the womb opening up in bedrock
fish born without eyes and sliding forward into darkness
guided down toward the warm heart at the center of their mother, the earth.



down there in wonderland

i walked quietly and kept my voice low 

careful not to disturb the seeds which slept curled up like babies

and saw how they would stretch their legs upon waking and feel their way up toward the sun

to get its attention.

having grown up in wonderland i can tell you the name of each ancient monster growling down deep in the pit of the stomach of their mother, the earth

(and hunger

terrific hunger and rage).

i heard the scratch of tectonic plates floating above our heads even as their rough hides whispered, rubbing up against cave walls built on the bones of their fathers and grandfathers: a thin, oily line of blood drawn up from her fleshy heart.



i heard scratch

and click

and breath

and stood still enough to feel them brush my face, leather and mohair and smooth obsidian and warm hematite.



down there in wonderland

i was privy to all their secrets:

how trees grow to bind each other up in burmese python and angel hair roots and hold each other steady to trudge through the ages together as through rushing flood water,

how boulders will trickle like tears if you let them melt,

how, in fact, all parts of the body are more river than mountain.



having grown up in wonderland

i can tell you i believe in motion above all things.

“Freud’s Last Session”: A Review

Heavy-handedness would be very easy in a production of “Freud’s Last Session.” To be honest, that was the thing I feared going into the performance Saturday night. “Freud’s Last Session” portrays a fictional conversation between Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, and C. S. Lewis, famed author of the Narnia series as well as a host of books on Christian apologetics and theology. The conversation takes place in Freud’s home in London in the early days of World War II, the exact day, in fact, England declares war on Germany, and just weeks before Freud’s death. The central topic the two discuss is the existence of God, or, more specifically, how one can know whether or not God exists.


Full disclosure: I’m a member of a growing group of people my age who have walked away from our church communities for various reasons. For some of us, the decision to leave was an easy one, but, for others (myself included), it was very difficult. I describe it to non-Christian friends of mine as waking up one day and finding out that maybe your parents don’t exist. My path of faith has been long and winding, full of dark patches, thorns, and wrong turns. Too often, conversations about God’s existence are so cerebral that they overshadow those long and winding paths of faith so many of us have walked; our emotions can be just as influential as our thoughts in determining what is true and what is not. I was conscious, too, of the experience of seeing a play like this in an audience which I assumed to be majority Christian. With these apprehensions, I took my seat Saturday night at the Arts Lab and waited for the play to begin.


The play ran eighty minutes, no intermission, no scene breaks. The set, Freud’s home office, was richly decorated with bookshelves full of books and ancient religious artifacts as well as the kind of chaise longue you’d expect in any psychoanalyst’s office on TV. The two actors, Jeff Salisbury (Lewis) and Larry Bower (Freud), plunged in, immediately establishing warmth between the two characters, though not always friendly intimacy. Along with the temptation to be heavy-handed might have come the temptation to villainize a character with whom you disagree, but Bower’s Freud was well-spoken, convicted, and even charming at times. I was particularly impressed with his handling of a German accent; it was very easy to believe this was an articulate man whose first language wasn’t English. 


Salisbury’s C. S. Lewis had echoes of how I’d imagined him when I was younger: convicted in his own right, some touches of lightness and humor, but also malleable. This was key for me. During the pre-show speech, director Lauren Nichols announced that this is a play about a difficult conversation, and we all might do well to learn how to discuss important topics in real kindness, without judgment. Again, a lesser production might have been heavy-handed, and, if anyone thinks that All for One’s “Freud’s Last Session” is casting C. S. Lewis as the hero, please think again. Lewis’s moments of concern for Freud never felt motivated by a desire to win him over to faith in God, but an example of caring for someone else for the sole reason that care is good.


Many of the points raised for or against the existence of God were familiar: the problem of evil, the existence of goodness, whether or not a universal moral law exists. Frankly, I wish I had brought a notebook to take notes. There were many points during which I would have liked to pause the performance and think things through. This is a production that invites you to ponder, and, hopefully, you’ll come away understanding that controversial conversations should never be about scoring points. Nichols writes in the program, “The playwright has remarked that he doesn’t think any audience member, coming to the play convinced of one position or the other, will go away with a changed mind. But perhaps many of us will be better informed in general, and more appreciative of the achievements of both of these men.”


In past conversations, Nichols has told me that it’s always her desire to bring unique offerings to the Fort Wayne stage which audiences aren’t likely to have seen anywhere else, but which also don’t compromise All for One’s values as a faith-based theatre company. Typical seasons offer a mix of family-oriented, religious, classic, and sometimes obscure offerings. In my opinion, All for One is at its finest when historical fiction is on the stage. In past seasons, the company has showcased some of its best and most imaginative work with stage adaptations of works like Jane Austen’s “Emma,” Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” 


I’ll add this strong production to All for One’s list of exceptional achievements and urge you, please, to go see it. There really is something for everyone in it, theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. It’s refreshing to feel invited to the table, so to speak, especially in a piece that discusses God’s existence (or lack thereof) so directly. “Freud’s Last Session” can be seen at the Parkview Physician’s Group Arts Lab, 300 E. Main Street, September 23 and 24 at 7:30 p.m., and September 25 at 2:30 p.m. Please visit allforone.org for more information.

Notes from Counseling

-She described the Evangelical worldview I grew up with as this strong oak tree and said that, right now, I’m kinda like a sapling, just starting to grow. I’m thin but flexible; I can blow in the wind. I didn’t think of it until I got home: Last year I was with my then-boyfriend, going from greenhouse to greenhouse in search of things to plant in his bare front yard. He told one of the gardeners about the oak tree there, and the gardener explained that oak trees suck up nutrients from the soil. Even if he were to build raised flower beds, that oak tree would eventually suck the soil dry, making it difficult for other things to grow. I marveled at how the Kingdom of God can grow like an oak tree, leaving me desolate and infertile.

-I also marveled at how funny everything sounded coming out of my mouth, how non-sensical. I told her about learning to reject evidence, that I didn’t believe in evolution until I was twenty-one. I told her about the high school teacher who told us that God had put dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith. (I didn’t necessarily believe it, but I put it next to the other possibilities as to how all the science pointed away from a six-thousand-year-old earth.)

-“God is like an angry football coach who screams at you all season, but you’re grateful for it when you win the tournament.” (I laughed when I said this; it’s a restatement of what I learned at ex-gay conferences: “God loves you too much to leave you where you are.”)

-I don’t know how people got the idea that God is benevolent.

-We talked about God being mean. She said, “Why would you want to worship a God like that?” I told her, “It doesn’t matter if you want to or not. If the Creator of the Universe is mean, He doesn’t give a shit about any of your protests.” Then she asked me, “Then why does it matter? Why live hell on earth?” I didn’t really have an answer, other than to say I’d thought that five years ago when things were REALLY bad.

(Tangent: I still think it’s kind of silly for people to say things like “I don’t believe in a God who hates” or “My God doesn’t judge people.” I wanna say, which God are you talking about? Certainly not the Christian God.)

-I told her about being a teenager, the moment the worldview starts to expand and I craved and I craved and I craved, and I was thirsty and surrounded by waterfalls but couldn’t ever drink enough to be satisfied. I told her about thinking of Christianity that way, and isn’t it sad to think I want something that doesn’t exist? To be satisfied, I mean. If satisfaction didn’t exist in Christianity, who’s to say it exists anywhere? And I cried over this one. The feelings were so vivid when I was young, and to think there’s no return for them… unimaginable. But, then, how many years of chasing do I have to do to realize it’s in vain? And being gay was like that when I was young, before I knew I was gay. Beauty everywhere, excitement everywhere, but no words to describe it. Desire before the law prohibited desire? Shockingly sweet.

(Tangent: Along the lines of the “God as football coach” thought is the image I had of God eight years ago. I felt like I was chasing Him, and occasionally He’d throw things back at me. Sometimes it’d be a bottle of water and other times it’d be a brick.)

-I can acknowledge that the oak tree has been toxic and that these beliefs are non-sensical. If I weren’t afraid of hell, I’d have already destroyed my spirituality to see what survived. She asked me about hell; she said, “You haven’t denied Jesus.”

I felt very, very tired after today’s session. I articulated a lot of things that need to be articulated.

Other thoughts after the session was over:

-I’m not yet ready to “listen to my gut”; I haven’t yet fully departed from the idea that my body is completely depraved, including the gut.

-Related to that: I’m not asking that my body be considered ‘good,’ but I would like not to believe that my body and all that comes with it (my mind, my heart, my sexuality) is garbage, because look where that has gotten me.