Are you there God?

Sensitive content:

-violence

-Mental health

-Gore or abuse

-„Are you there, God? It´s me; a forgiving spouse, considerate mother, and a most selfish human being. A sheep in wolf's clothing. is it ok if I come in here, and just sit for a while? I feel I need to talk to you. Until today, I never granted you much belief. I hope you won´t hold that against me. In fact, I´m not even a Christian. But this church seems like the perfect place to talk to you. I read somewhere, that churches are supposed to represent, the domed curves of the heavens. I can´t get a sense of it, though. Heaven, I mean. It´s not that I´m not a spiritual person, because I like to think that I am. It´s just that I never got a sense of a paradise above the clouds, where beings reside, designed to guide us.

When I was eight years old a nun told me that I was going to burn in hell. She was sure of it. there was no hope for me. And truth be told, I can imagine hell. Been there once or twice. And I´m about to visit there again, but I´ll get to that later.

Around the same time, I found a book, hidden at the bottom of a large trunk in my aunt’s house. It was quite an effort for my little hands to rake the book with the gilded pages out of there. I could sense that this was a Christian book, else why would such a beautifully ornated piece be hidden in a Jewish house? I took the book to a small window and opened its henges, and lo and behold there were even pictures. I couldn´t take my eyes off it. it had gothic lettering, which was too difficult for me to read, so I just stared at the pictures of Moses opening the Red Sea, and the Holy Land with its giant grapes and other fruit. Further in the book, there was a man who always seemed to be walking with the sun on his head, even when he was hanging bleeding from a tree. I didn´t like that picture too much, so I turned the page, and the man went up into the clouds. I started to think that Christians went to a heaven that was built on a layer of stratocumulus clouds. I decided that our heavenly garden was more pleasant, with hedges and rosebushes and fountains of milk and honey.

Are you there, God? Are you listening? Or am I boring you already? I wonder if I would bore myself if I were to meet myself in a stranger.

I´m having a sartorially challenging day. I even struggled to pull an outfit together this morning.

Have you noticed that I am made of two persons? One who goes out, and one who goes in. The one going in enters through observation, and in some mysterious way wants to produce poems. You should know all about that, right? You work in mysterious ways, they say.

I live in the suburbs, not too far from here. Guess you already knew that, and if you don´t: it´s a lonely place. Not that anybody will admit to that. Most people live there because it makes them feel safe and comfortable. The lawns are big, and everywhere you look there are warning signs about canine feces. I live there because I´m a glutton for pain I suppose. I have to look relay all the time, while on the inside I freak out.

I´m married. Yes, I am a bravado feat of family portraiture: savage and claustrophobic. My marriage is an armistice. On second thought, it looks more like a long stretch of scatological low comedy. And that´s on the good days.

I drifted into a romantic stalemate. Sounds nicer if you put it like that, don´t you think God? I tried to escape the gravity of the self-centered consciousness of my spouse. In fact, I´m still working on it. I guess by now, you must be smiling because the universality of this predicament doesn´t need to be asserted to be appreciated right?

Last night I thought of breaking out the booze. I didn´t! It gives me a headache the next day, and that never helps.

Pardon my French, God, but I fucked up. Big time!

I´m drowning right now. I ended up where I never intended to live. Serving at the pleasure of an entitled, fuck. Excuse my language, please. I don´t usually use foul language. Can´t help myself today. Forgive me!

I grew up around people who felt the necessity to emphasize that a woman is simply designed to take care of and have nurturing and mothering feelings. Make herself omnipresent and invisible at the same time. indemnify the household and be grateful it is the center of her universe. Tend to everybody like a 5-star hotel butler, never complain and suffer in silence.

I guess you know all about that because if I´m to believe men, which I don´t, You were the instigator of all this misery.

Take my word for it, if I may be so bold, conditioning people only to think and not to feel has dire consequences. It leads us to seek out appropriate and inappropriate venues to feel out humanity.

My husband is in hot waters right now, so to speak. He had one too many illicit affairs with his students.

I don´t care much about that. I never minded his dalliances. He always was more a roommate, and a lousy one at that, than a husband. Now our days I have upgraded him to a pile of dirty laundry.

 I am angry at these young women though. Why can´t they look at themselves and see anything but little leaves at the mercy of the wind in a world that doesn´t belong to them. Why can´t they look at themselves and see powerful women? Admit that they are interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of good old-fashioned taboo, and a little bit of fun? That never killed anyone, right?

Women´s appetites are viciously patrolled, from sex to professional recognition and everything in between.

Men… they are composed of desire, and too thick-skulled to realize that their world of hedonistic masculinity is on the verge of extinction.

Me? I´m left humiliated and maimed. Oh well, I told you I fucked up already, didn´t I? Still, if a man had done what I did, I probably would have been blamed: bad woman, poor excuse for a wife, and so on… 

His name was Brad. And before I go on: no, I´m not here to seek forgiveness or to find a solution. I knew what I was doing. All too well.

I got anti-cellulite massages, started to exercise, went on a diet. I monitored my appearance with truculent vigilance. Brad not only became a venue of suppressed horniness, but a tool of vengeance directed at the pile of dirty laundry I before mentioned.

But mostly, I was angry at the entire world. Especially the world who denies women the ecstasy of… well, I´m sure You know what I´m talking about here.

True, I did leave Brad unconscious and shackled to a chair. Forgive me if I skip the details of how he came to be in that position.

I had turned into a woman of monstrous rapacity. I forcibly restrained Brad. It made me feel good; this demigod was my prey, my prize. Mine!

But then I dithered: I lacked the courage of my convictions, it dissolved into ambivalence. I guess I am too old for that kind of excitement.

I found no freedom or reward, in my crossing the line. It made me the queen of sour apple anti-heroines.

Tell me, God, would this fury smell of villainy if it was attached to a man?

Brad remains safely ensconced in triumphant victimhood. And where were you, God? Where you lurking nearby, in a dark corner perhaps?

I always wanted to study your hidden attributes. Not that I wanted to demystify your mysteries but deepen them. I dreamed of sliding into a liminal zone and merging with the supernatural.

I think you´re a master of paradox, God. you have the power to turn darkness into light. Falsehoods into truth.

I wish I had that power, to bend nature to my will. Induce the calming effect of a narcotic for those who can fathom to believe in me. But I can only fake magic.

If you ask me, your laws are made up of dead letters, God. why couldn´t you institute polyamory? That would have simplified a lot of things, I can tell you that.

Why could you not come up with rituals where we are allowed to dance naked, instead of prescribing mundane rites like cooking 

soup and washing stains out of our husbands’ pants and scrubbing menstrual blood off sheets and out of dresses, while our dearly beloved second halves are allowed to be composed of desire.

What would happen, I wonder if we all started to disregard the unglamorous fundamentals of their world? Create another reality. Dismiss the impossible and rebuild a better world.

A world that understands how it feels to be driven mad, by having been reduced to cooking chicken soup and washing menstrual blood out of sheets. Diminished to nothing more than a disposable ornament. A piece of the décor at best, in a house filled with artifacts that maybe one day will witness of our past relevance. A world where we don´t have to wake up, to the bitter sharpness of society´s cruelty in the tradition of the best melodramas. Women´s of course.

And now, God, it´s time for me to return to that society that requires the dissolution of myself, like an ecstasy evaporating, brought to a form of art, and demands of me that I stay home. So that after I die, they can say at my funeral what an angel I was. It´s just an infinity of empty monologues, to serve but one purpose: to erase by anointing, the woman at home who only exists in service of others, never to herself.

I really have to go now. Thank you, God, for listening. Thanks, an awful lot!