Are You There God? It's Me ... You
It’s literally seconds before Bobbi’s laughter cascades around us, lighting the patio like sun emerging from clouds. Its rays put in stark relief not what cancer has so clearly taken from her but, rather, how much of her it will never claim.
Bobbi and I met before I fell into a fit of youthful zealotry. When she and Katherine invited me to their oak tree fort, the ramifications of my every move being recorded had not yet sunk in. Why should God not delight in giggled secrets among dappled light? In dizzying art made of gravity and centripetal force? By turns, we’d hook a leg over the uneven bars at the back of the playground and free fall forward. For us, a swirl of cracked asphalt, chain-link fence, piercing azure sky; asphalt, fence, sky; black, pewter, cornsilk. Rising to greet him again and again, Bobbi’s magnified eyes gleaming behind glasses, my uneven front teeth bared in grin, Katherine’s spray of freckles.
I thought myself precocious then. Not only had I resolved the greatest debate of all time, I was wise enough to keep it to myself, to look for holes in what seemed so obvious a conclusion. Weren’t creationism and the Big Bang just two ways of telling the same story? Wouldn’t God making light have caused a hell of a clap?
I went to church with Bobbi, certain I’d find more proof, Catholics and Mormons another instance of same story, different version. If Bobbi were here, she’d tell you, cackling, that, after Bingo in the narthex, I’d confided to my parents that people were, whisper behind cupped hands, smoking in church. I remember neither cathedral nor vestibule, neither ashtray nor flashboard, only the drive home in her parents’ backseat. Blasting “Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine” into sunlight and sipping lime grape juice, I felt freer than I could name. Perhaps, I’d found a surveillance blind spot.
To hide is power. Ask the hunted. To avoid my desire for that power, I fell to my knees with zeal and forgot all about multiple truths. The God slated to review the reels of my life in order to pronounce my eternal fate had sacrificed his favorite son. I, born among his chosen, would give an Oscar-worthy performance.
The walk-in closet of a Park City condo during a—parent-free!—birthday party was, depending on point of view, inciting incident or climax. After an eve of swimming and moonlit hide-and-seek, I sat alone among extra linens attempting to mute the unseen screams of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre, aria to an accompanying chorus of squeals. I’m not sure I fully believed, even then, that God took pleasure in my pious avoidance of two near cardinal sins—R-rated movies and peer pressure.
When not too many years later, I left my childhood home, angry and flailing, still a teen, Bobbi took me in though we’d been more friendly than close for years. The front room of the apartment she shared with her boyfriend became my bedroom. On her lumpy fold-out couch I lay, pretty damn sure there was no camera to hide from. Surer I’d keep falling forward either way and that, whether he was watching or not each time I rose back up to see the world afresh, the God of my childhood wasn’t for me.
Was it a new god I sought in blotter hits and white powder, raves and trips under the stars during the months that followed until high school graduation—when Bobbi’s and my life would depart ways for years? Or was I only trying to drown shame, learned and earned?
On that patio, pumpkin-colored beers lit by afternoon rays and laughter, Bobbi is not long for this world, and we both know it. She lays on the table between us the toil of holding down 500 calories a day so she can avoid a feeding tube alongside the latest tea she has to spill. We share sweet potato fries and memories of a playground swirling in our vision. The fervor of her gratitude for husband, son, sisters, and parents matches that with which she inquires into the state of my heart. She still forms the raunchiest of jokes in the heart of grace. I’ll never find more reverence than that in her unsoiled irreverence.
Bobbi will be the third woman whose life was once entangled in mine to stop breathing in this realm. When a turn on a dark country road took Mendy in our late twenties, I hadn’t yet fully formed my new understanding of “god.” Or maybe I had but didn’t quite know it. After she was gone, I often felt her in the breeze, in its easy way of infusing anything it touched with dance. Golden strands of light toppling through oak leaves recalled cornflower locks spilling down her back or over her shoulders. At the brook below the spot I parked my RV, home during a crossroads in my life, her voice would gurgle, Speak your truth, girl.
After Natalie left this world in our midthirties, though it had been long since we’d shared our lives, she began to stop by for a visit in my dreamworld. Not there for unfinished business, as I might have guessed, she merely came to share an alternative timeline, one we’d once planned. She’d borrow a cup of sugar. We’d clink glasses on a porch swing. Her hazel eyes would turn emerald with mischief, and I’d feel the warmth of impending adventure in my veins.
And even before Ruby the van and I slide along the roads to our hometown toward Bobbi’s celebration of life, hers stopped in our forties months after the patio, Bobbi has become my reader. It is to the fertile ground of her unbridled enthusiasm I often write.
I continue to breathe, while these women who made my heart and others’ beat with greater joy and purpose do not. So, I don’t search for sense or justice. Instead, I wonder who I’ll visit and how after my body has rejoined soil and seed and sun. I tell what I see as honestly as I can. I seek out gorgeously told, often spectacularly distinct versions of this world we all share to shed light on my blindspots.
Thank you to
for this assignment. Thank you to for encouraging us to be each other’s assigning editors by asking for the posts we want to read and taking on the requests we thought we could write. “Are You There, God? It’s Me … You” was inspired by Todd’s request: “Name one thing about God you don’t believe anymore and what you believe instead.” I took on two more and assigned two myself. Keep an eye out.And thank YOU for reading. I’m including this among the first Saturday stories of having each other’s backs, because Bobbi had mine when I needed a place to land. Here’s the collection.
The ASK and GIVE chat, the collection’s companion, is open 24/7. A special edition today. What topic do you want someone else to write about. ASK. 🤲 What post do you wanna share? GIVE. 🎁
🏝Let’s grow community together.
You can also support my work financially, which would enable the centripetal force of my work here to keep rising to greet the world afresh.
Holly, as one who has lost many friends, I met my grateful mourner self in this piece. I love the title. And that line about rejoining soil and seed and sun.”
People say there's a difference between poetry and prose. This heartfelt piece suggests otherwise. Well said, Holly. Thanks for letting us in. I echo the words of those who commented before I did.