This One's for God

I can't quite remember the first time God came to me. Maybe it was in a dream. Maybe it was in a concert hall. Perhaps it was back when I was much smaller, hunched into the back of my dad's sweaty car in the English summertime, seatbelt blazing hot and plastered against my skin like a holy badge. Like He had marked me in the only way I would understand.

He certainly didn't come to me at church. I am almost afraid of churches. I live not ten minutes away from one – entirely unassuming, horrendously friendly – four walls that house a repair shop on Thursdays, a food bank on Saturdays, and family-friendly mass on Sundays. I know I am welcome. I see it in their beckoning smiles when I linger near the door too long. But I keep walking, time and time again.

He comes to me at strange times now, and it is impossible for me to pick out a pattern of when he does. When I had walked myself into a frenzy across a lumpy marsh, growing dizzy under stretches of looming pylons – miles away from signal and the river I had intended to follow, fat tears streaming down my face – he did not guide me. But I felt Him there. When I lost my childhood dog, and I was battered with a feeling like I had one of my limbs ripped away from me, he offered me no solace. But I knew He was there.

Even when I felt the chord within me that had been pulled so tight for so long snap, and my bare feet carried me across the blisteringly cold pavement onto the road – gravel sticking to the skin and armoured with such an impenetrable resolution to die – He did not hold me back. But when I stepped back onto the curb, cowering away from blinding headlights, I was so sure He was there. Not merciful, not patient, nor kind. But looking upon me like He was disappointed. Like there was so much more than this.

Perhaps that is what I am most afraid of. What else is there to be afraid of when there is a being that can see inside yourself? I am wracked with the weight of knowing what He knows. The secrets I have not told another soul. The memories that I hold onto even though I shouldn't. All the people I've forgiven, and the people that I've damned.

I think longingly of what it would be like to enter a confessional. I have only read about them in books and seen them in movies, but I know enough to shape and mould one in the confines of my mind.

I can picture myself, lowered onto a small and dusty bench, basking in the shadows that dance across me from the wooden window, hands clasped and reminding myself how to pray. Listening to a slow and steady voice on the other side of the box, calling me dear child and assuring me that this was a safe space.

Only God is listening, they'd say.

Maybe that's the problem.

I don't want Him to listen, but I want Him to hear me. I want Him to understand the hell that I am burdened with. I want to ask Him whether He understands what it's like to feel like you're growing so much you can burst out of your bones. Whether he understands that the enormity of feeling anything at all renders me bed-bound some days.

I want to ask Him that if we are really created in His image, then why has He made me this way? With a soldier's blood and a drunk's hands and a lost woman's soul. Crawling her way out of a childhood that was too loud into a womanhood of more want than I could have ever prepared for, enamoured by knowledge, driven by power, and desperate for the attention of Man.

It has been exactly five years since I wore a cross around my neck. Five years since I have felt the soft press of familiar metal against the hollow of my throat. These days, I find myself reaching out for the ghost of it against my skin, itching to find it against my searching fingertips.

I am not comforted by the presence of God. But I would be both a writer and a liar if I told you now that I do not seek Him out. If that is my religion – and if God so wills it – then with that, I am content.