mutually assured destruction (church)

it was a humid summer, a long summer, but i only remember the sunday's. sunday's were the best days and the worst days. mother went to church and i was never invited. that summer, after the accident, mother found god's love (06/18/1998 god is love, she wrote in her diary). mother wanted god's love all to herself because she felt empty and needed to be filled up. on sunday's, i tried to find god, so that i could find what she was buried under and try my best to dig her out.

that summer we were crazy, mother and me. katy was my best friend from down the street and she was crazy, too. she told me she could help me find god's love, so on sunday's when mother was gone we went to our own church, in the bushes half-way between her house and mine. we made an alter of sticks and stones. we gathered a pile of elicit materials to help us really feel the spirit of god: needles, lighters, candy, plastic shooters of vodka stolen from 7-11, playboy magazines, cigarettes, mother's diary.

sunday mornings were a religious experience for all of us. katy and i were always high and so was mother, sitting in a wooden pew 20 minutes out of town.

on the day i died, i did not feel god's love. i felt my body fill up with heat and light, and i thought, 'is this him?' but i was just melting away in the summer sun, melting into earth like it was a swimming pool. i saw the light and it shone bright, it shone like the sun because that's what it was. and i felt the love but it wasn't god's love, it was mother's love, it was katy's love, it was summer's love. and then the lights became bright and fluorescent as they wheeled me down the hall of the hospital. i opened my eyes and i felt new, i felt alive, i looked up at mother to smile at her and let her know that it was ok. but mother was looking up, she was trying to find god somewhere in the ceiling, she was shouting "god please let her be ok! god please save her!"

it was sunday and mother was still buried in god's love when i died and came back to life. mother was still buried in god's love and she was buried so deep that she could only look upwards; if she had just looked down, she would have known, i was there and i was smiling.