Carrion

photo by Erwin Dimal

I used to sing in the church choir, playing the little box drum, the cajon, though I had no sense of rhythm. I would lose track of the melody, and as the loudest voice in our little group, I’d throw us all off. But I liked the snap of it on my palm. The rappy tang of its percussive bite. We argued a lot in the choir, about appropriate songs and whether the congregation would sing along with us. Though I looked forward to rehearsal each week, it was exhausting.

When I sang, I stood at the front, behind the microphone, raised above the gathered crowd. I’d open my hands as though ready to receive something, though what, I still don’t know.

I have so many memories of myself in various churches, sitting in various pews, singing various hymns, following the same formula. I spent most of my time mouth open, like a cry.

My earliest memory is at a cathedral. As a child, I called it the blue church. I didn’t like the way the candles flickered uneasily in the too-bright Sunday morning air. I watched them intently, afraid to look away, in case they tumbled, burned the whole place to the ground.

For years now, I’ve laughed telling my secular friends, “I grew up Catholic?” In so many ways, it feels like a code for saying: yeah, I lied to my parents about having sex. Or: yeah, I went to church, but, like, I still drink. Or a segue into a joke about priests and altar boys. This is easy. This formula of growing up into agnosticism, of one day, perhaps before you’ve ever formally considered why, walking out the doors of your childhood parish for the last time. People praise you. They are happy for you, for your liberation.

I have a tattoo on my upper left forearm, my first. I was eighteen and terrified and broke. It took less than ten minutes and my best friend went with me. She was impressed by the way I didn’t mind the pain, the force of my impulsivity. It’s Latin, my handwriting, though too-small and blown-out and generally ill-advised, aesthetically. Now, when people ask about it, I obfuscate.

“What does that mean?”
“Oh, it’s my handwriting.”
“Yeah, but like… what language is that?”
“Um, Latin.”
“So what’s it…”
“I used to go really hard for Jesus, okay?”

The last time I said this to someone, I was lighting a joint. They laughed at the irony, and we moved on. But I think about it often because I feel like I should hate this tattoo. It comes from a prayer I haven’t said in years now, from a ritual I performed one winter: totus tuus ego sum, et omnia mea tua sunt. I am all yours, and all that I have is yours.

Every time I disclose that translation, I feel like someone has seen me naked.

Other people think I should hate it too. But I don’t. On my body, often visible in T-shirts, dresses, under the summer sun, it feels as much a part of me as the skin itself. In a way, it’s a comfort. Reminding me I can always go back. Because what people don’t understand is the grief. I grew up with a certainty like bedrock under my feet: about the world, my place in it, and what came after. About who I was, what I was supposed to be. And when I felt stifled, I less blamed the faith that I carried in my pocket like a talisman, and more the people who carried it with me. The friends who scoffed at my foul mouth, the curse words I learned from my mother, and the insistence I had on immodest clothing (read: a strong and enduring distaste for maxi dresses).

When the same people who want to know about the tattoo ask why I left, I lie and say I came out. I mean, I did come out, and I did leave, but the two events, though occurring in rapid succession, actually had very little to do with one another. I knew I was queer for almost a year before giving up on Catholicism entirely. And while I didn’t exactly talk about it openly around friends who insisted “we can’t technically make it illegal because of freedom of religion,” I also didn’t particularly feel hated, oppressed, or anything like that. Of course, this was a privilege. But I stepped into the quiet campus chapel where I attended mass every day at noon and felt as at home there as I always had. There were no padded kneelers like there were in larger churches. We pressed our knees directly into the concrete floor. No stained glass either, no statues, only a square wooden chair where the priest with a suspiciously southern accent sat to preach, and a round altar that looked more like an entryway table than a place of ritual and worship.

We didn’t sing at those services, and I liked that. The quiet was refreshing in days spent hurrying around a city I was still barely familiar with in my first months of university, and shaking the hands of strangers who gathered beside me for the pre-mass rosary, I felt seen. I felt held.

Still.

It took a long time. Like the dying of a decades-long love affair, a drawn-out divorce, I gradually started sleeping on the couch of the belief system I’d made my identity for most of my life. A tightness gathered in my stomach on Sunday evenings when I played piano (poorly) for the choir. The communion wafers that once sent me into reverential stillness felt hollow and empty on my tongue. Surely, my political beliefs were changing; surely, that was why. But I knew deep down I’d been a progressive long before my faith began to die. Just as certainly as I knew that there was space for people like me, anti-conservatives like me, in this home I was slowly but surely turning away from.

When I used to sing in that church choir, I made a show of holiness walking up to receive communion. Though no one was watching, we were on display at the front of the church, and I opened my mouth, extended my tongue for the priest to place the bread on gently. And I bowed my head and folded my hands.

I no longer pray.

In some ways, I’ve always had my doubts. As a child, I was terrified of eternity. I still am. There’s a Fiona Apple song I like, where she howls, “And I know when I go / All my particles disband and disperse / And I’ll be back in the pulse.” I don’t believe this either, not really, not if I’m being honest. But nonexistence is not much more comforting, so I try not to think about it. No matter how I try to avoid it, though, the grief is deep and long-lasting, and when I attend church while visiting my parents, it rears its mournful head back up within me. I cannot sing, though I long to sing. I do not meet the eyes of anyone I know.

It is a private grief. I keep my grandfather’s crucifix in a drawer in my nightstand. When an old roommate found it as I was moving in, she laughed: “I was super worried.” I still have old rosaries, though their chains are broken.

Often, I miss the person I was then, though I pity her, too. I pity how small she felt, how she hated her body and what it wanted, how afraid she was of death and sin, how wracked she was by guilt and fear. But if I’m being honest, she still is. Just under different names. Without anything, anyone to fall back on, she often feels she’s all she has.

I think, maybe, I’ll go to Easter mass. It feels easy, like something I should do, and I miss the ritual, holding the candles after sundown on Holy Saturday, the singing of the annual chant, the quiet, breath-holding reverie of the dozens of us gathered, often in the still-biting chill of late winter or early spring, to sing Christ back into the world. I yearn, deeply and with a longing that frightens me, for belief in a resurrection.