One of the prompts given in my Stunt Writing class is to describe how religion has affected who I am. As soon as I read this, a image blasted into my mind of a girl (me) sitting in a window-seat in the dark, staring out through the glass at some sort of specter. This is what came out of that image.
I'm sitting in a wide window seat snapping my fingers without rhythm. The
big house I'm in is creaking. Wind is whistling as if calling overseas friends
out to play. In my head though, there is the quiet that comes with prayer,
though I have never prayed.
The room itself is nothing but shadows and a patch of golden carpet where my
red slippers sit. I have one leg folded beneath me and the other drawn close to
my chest. My hands are in my lap, the rings on each finger flashing with the
silver coming in through the glass.
The window is right out of Peter Pan, just as my nightgown could have been
stolen from Wendy herself. Even the expression on my face as I stare outside at
the falling snow is one of longing, as if any moment, I expect a boy with
pixy-dust in his eyes to rap his knuckles on the pane in greeting.
The person that drifts up to the window, however, is no Peter Pan. She's
just tangles of fog, gray ribbons twisting and looping. She leans towards my
window and suddenly she has a form. It is almost as if she is leaning out from
the stern of a pirate ship, her hair and her heart caught up by the constant
gale.
She peers in at me and instead of pixy-dust in her eyes; there are
campfires, not the kind the downtown homeless derive comfort from, but the sort
that cowboys struck up on lonely nights in the wood.
"Your campfires are dim tonight." I smile at her and see those
fires flicker with amusement.
"If you let me in, you can warm yourself by them." Her eyes, green
like Peter Pan's, green like mine, lift upwards to focus on the windows
clasp.
"If you were a ghost, you could come in on your own."
"But I'm not a ghost."
"We've been over this. You can only be a ghost if I let you
be." It is a profound thing for me to say and as conservative as I am, it
is also uncharacteristic. Had this been a restaurant window and had the floating
girl been just a friend, I would never have said such a thing.
I reach up, release the latch and allow a gust of air to rush over me. It is
ironic then, what she asks of me next.
"Do you feel warmer?"
"If I did, it would be nothing more than a placebo affect. If I believe
you have warmth in you, if I believe in your fire, then I would feel warmth.
Your affect on me is based on my belief in you. Without my belief, you aren't
even empty air."
"After all these months, you still don't know what to call me. The best
you've done is come up with what I'm not," She hooks her thumbs in the
pockets of her weathered leathers. "Negatives aren't names Natalie."
"When I first see you," I feel my hair, red as a bloodied sunset,
brush back from my shoulders by a sneaky breeze. Some would have thought my
visitor was causing it, but as I didn't think so, it wasn't. "You
make me think of a ghost."
"But to call me a ghost, you'd have to admit they exist. You'd like
that. You want there to be magic in the world." She knows me, knows me
better than my own mother. Any statement she makes about me is true and mirrors
my own opinions perfectly. There is no shallow pool for us; only into the deep
end of conversation do we dive.
"People want there to be an afterlife too. That doesn't make it exist.
My wishing magic existed doesn't mean I can wave my fingers and give myself
purple nose hair." I smiled and leaned my head against the wall.
"You're not a ghost. You're not an angel. You're not Peter Pan."
"More negatives."
"You're not even a negative. You're only here because I decided you
are."
"So what if you decided I was a ghost or an angel? Would that make me
real? Or would I be like your room, walls of wishes and wanting, but lacking in
belief?"
Soon as she says it, the moon moves into just the right position. Moonlight
floods into my room and dances off millions of wings. There are fairies on
bookshelves, angels on posters and sprites in the wallpaper. There is a mural
across the ceiling full of clouds and darting dragons. My headboard is lined
with griffins with snarling faces. In front of my closed door, like a grisly
welcoming mat; there is a row of gargoyles. There is even a little pink butted
and rosy cheeked cupid trapped inside a snow-globe. My mother bought it for me
when I reached my sweet sixteen and found myself still single.
"For someone who doesn't believe in the divine Natalie, you sure have
surrounded yourself with it."
"The Star Trek books in my closet don't mean I want to be an astronaut
and build an igloo on the moon. My shoe-boxes full of Australia postcards don't
mean I'm going to one day sleep in hostels where geckos climb the ceiling. The
wings on my walls don't mean I think there's a heaven out there. You're not an
angel here to convince me of a god, not that in that cowgirl getup you've got
on. No, you're here to ask profound questions in order to get profound answers,
all of which you know already. Our brains run together like drains, after
all."
"Why do you keep bringing me here if you learn nothing from it? If you
will not budge from your position, why talk about this at all?"
"A person that refuses to discuss their opinions must doubt those very
opinions. Those that openly admit their beliefs and share the nature of them
with others, they are the ones that are steadfast. I am not afraid of these
questions. I am not afraid to call myself an atheist."
"Then why are you afraid to say that title aloud to ears that actually
hear?"
"Its' like when I call myself a homeschooler and people decide I am
sheltered, uneducated and hopelessly friendless. When I say ‘atheist,’ I am
accused of believing in nothing. What the hell though? Why is it that my not
believing in a religion must mean that I have no beliefs at all? I believe in
love, in family, in a brother having the back of a brother. I believe in
loyalty and sacrifice and keeping toxic secrets in order to protect those
they'd hurt. I don't believe in god, a higher power, the divine or you. Don't
look hurt. You knew that."
The hurt sits at the forefront of her expression for but a moment, then it
sinks beneath the surface. No longer do I suspect that she wants to behead me
like one of the zombies I write about in my books. Her bangs fall into her eyes
and she makes an accusation of her own.
"You're different tonight. You usually want something from me. Now, I
sense you want to give."
"I know who I am. I am a good daughter, sister and friend. One day, I
will raise kids who are homeschoolers and atheists. I am proud of who I am,
but-" I hesitate, bite at my lip, a habit I despise and secretly believe
myself unable to defeat. "Tell me about the road and when you're done,
I'll give you what you want."
"What I want?" She reels back from the window slightly, retreating
as I have never seen her do. She cannot have wants, not when hers are mine.
"Yes," I murmur and settle lower in my seat. "I'll give you a
name," I shut my eyes and then spin a finger in the air to hurry her
along. "Tell me of the road."
“I live out of a backpack. I wear old leathers that smell like horses even
though I don’t ride. I build fires in the middle of the woods in the hope that
somebody will appear out of the woods and share it with me. I drift in and out
of towns; make love to nameless men under stars I know so well, I could give
celestial tours. I don’t stay anywhere, but I do make friends. They live out of
backpacks too and together, we all smell of horses and shared campfires and the
meandering road. We travel on foot, on trains, on buses and planes and boats.
Our pockets grow stuffed with receipts and boarding passes. We sleep next to an
ocean that steals our spare clothing in the night. We sleep next to cliffs so
sheer; we could tumble to our deaths and smile into the fall. Our backpacks are
our pillows and our scars are our stories. When I sit with them, my friends and
the stars and the fire, I warm my secrets over the flames like I do my
frostbitten hands. I don’t hide who I am, my pride at my better parts, my shame
at the darker ones. They know god is not my North Star because they’ve seen me
whistle at the true twinkling one.
As she speaks, I can see her story fall into place upon her. She is wearing
the leathers that smell of horsehide. Her arms, which are bare to the shoulder,
are littered in her scars, telltale signs of her toxic secrets. Strapped to her
shoulders is a backpack. It’s old and worn and full of holes, as if somebody
has beaten it with a club. She holds it out to me and it seems to sag with the
effort of remaining corporeal. It is a tired looking thing, but a contented
sort of tired.
“What wouldn’t you give to be me?” Her voice sounds as if there are clopping
hooves hidden within it.
“What would you give to turn yourself inside out, to
be the one sleeping under the North Star, a nomad, who sees a girl in a Wendy
nightgown hovering outside her window? What would you give to live out of a
backpack, out on the road?"
“There is a part of me that wants nothing more than to walk out the front
door, board a bus, stuff my pockets with paper and take off. Its’ a part that
aches,” I can’t help wincing at saying such a vulnerable thing aloud. “But I’m
lucky. I don’t need to go anywhere at all to be a nomad,” I reach out, not for
the backpack, but for her hat. I plop it on my own head, its stiffness all but
gone with time. It smells like her too, smells like the nomad I’ve dreamed her
into being.
But an uncanny thing happens when the hat hits my head. My Wendy nightgown
vanishes, to be replaced by leathers. My skin ripples into the bronze of desert
travel. My hair draws itself into a low, loose, lazy ponytail. I didn’t need to
look in a mirror to know there were campfires in my eyes.
"You know what to call me," She retreated without moving.
"Say it. Say it now."
"You’re like every one of my stories. You’re like every bible and
religion there is," I stand up on the purple cushions and plant my feet,
clad in bent out of shape boots, firmly. Bracing my hands to either side of the
window, I lean out and confront my negative. "Every day, in every country,
people want the impossible to exist. You hear a creak in the other room and you
want it to be the ghost of your dead mother. So it is. Your brother nearly gets
run down by a car, but dodges just in time and you see a miracle. So it is.
Your baby was born with low chances of survival, but hangs on anyway because of
its guardian angel. So it is. You want an angel, a ghost or you want god, then
they are there. I can do that too. I'm an atheist and I can do that. You want
to know how? Because I, just like you and everybody else, have a fucking
imagination. I imagined you up. I wrote you up. You and the bible and god and
ghosts and angels and Bigfoot, you all exist for one reason and one reason
only, because humans have an imagi-fucking-nation! You have a name and it’s a
figment. You are a figment of my imagination. Like god, you don't exist if I
decide you don't," I lower my voice back down to a whisper, to the pitch
of a prayer. "Want to know what sets me and you aside from Christians and
their god? I know that when I snap my fingers, you'll be gone, because you live
off of me. All of those Christians?” My voice loses its volume, lowers to the
pitch of crackling coals. They've forgotten how to snap their fingers.”
I snap my fingers then and the figment of my imagination vanishes. My skin
is the color of chilled winter, my hair is adrift and my nightgown is swishing
about my knees. I pull the window shut, latch it and sit back down in the
window seat. The big house is still creaking. The wind is still whistling
as if calling overseas friends out to play. In my head, there is the quiet that
comes with prayer, but it isn’t derived from words whispered over clasped
hands.
It’s because I could, at any second, snap my fingers and create entire
universes, entire religions
.
“You were right Figment,” Staring up at the North Star; I drum my fingers
against my knee. “I do feel warmer.”
