Breathe Me || Completed

10.1

10.1 - God

Love is a strong word for what goes on between God and me.

I remember this song from Sunday School that goes, "Jesus loves me, yes I know, for the bible tells me so."

And that's it, really. The Bible says, your preacher says, your parents say, the world says, there's an old bearded white dude in the sky who loves you and so does his son Jesus, and even though you've never met them, they've never even stopped by to say hello, actually, but you love them too. You love God because he is your father and Jesus because he's your role-model older brother, but then, they're also the same person so Jesus is God's father too because he is God and God is Jesus so does that make God my brother too, and how can that be if he made me and no one made god and there's a lot of other things too, like how this bread is actually Jesus's flesh and here, drink this blood, oh, and Jesus' mom is a virgin because you didn't have enough things to worry about -- now you can get pregnant without having sex.

Cool, is what I said when I was a kid.

Okay.

Sure.

Why not.

At school in Brooklyn, nobody believed. Even the kids in my Sunday School class, they were the ones who made the loudest jokes, ridiculing the whole damn thing. And I watched them, took in their disdain and their bitterness at this thing we'd been brought into. But I could quite pull myself out of it, ever.

Because I did see Jesus once, actually. Samantha saw him, too.

Growing up, Samantha was one of the only real Christian kids I knew. And oddly enough, she didn't drag her feet behind strict Catholic parents on the way to church like the rest of us. No, her parents would be high on coke and fighting in the apartment and Samantha would be at mass, memorizing all the responses and when to sit and stand and shake hands.

My parents always offered for her to come with us, and she did if she slept over Saturday into Sunday. But on days when she didn't, we would see her there anyway, standing alone in the very back pew with her ratty Giants sweatshirt swallowing her up like a dirty gray monster. We would ask if she wanted to sit with us up front. Sometimes she said yes but more often she shook her head. I would look back at her during mass and see her eyes closed, her mouth moving along to a memorized hymn.

Her piety never really struck me as odd until later, after I moved away. Every one of her words and actions seemed to be spit on Jesus' divine face. I knew she listened during Mass, but she seemed adamant not to apply anything in the bible to her life.

But I'm not surprised when I open the bathroom door and ask her what she's doing and she answers, "Praying." She's sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a wooden rosary wound around her fingers. I sit down beside her. She scoots an inch away from me, silent.

We were eight years old when we saw Jesus Christ. We were at Newport playground right before it opened at six o'clock, so there was no one but us on the playscape. I was supposed to be sleeping over at Samantha's house, which I had, but she had wanted to leave before her parents woke up. They fought a lot in the mornings, about silly things like who forgot to buy coffee at the store and why the eggs always had to be scrambled and you can make your own damn eggs and other things, too. So I went with her to the playground.

The bars in the gate were wide enough that we just slipped through. I remember Samantha climbing up the slide in her torn-up shoes, and I remember following her. It was early, early spring, the beginning of March, and the morning was bitterly cold. We cuddled up next to each other on the landing above the slide. I remember that we shared my down jacket, Samantha's left arm in the left arm hole and my right arm in the right arm hole. All she had to keep her warm was her dad's big green "kiss me, I'm Irish" sweatshirt.