something different tonight.

I want to write about anything but writing. But really, I just want to write. Per usual, my thoughts feel scattered and elastic and just-out-of-reach and I keep finding a little thing here and a little thing there to do. Fold the laundry, make an omelet, hang a picture. I’m always so productive at the moment I tell myself to write.

What if I wrote about something different tonight? What if I wrote about how I used to believe in God and now I don’t? Even writing that sentence puts my stomach into knots. It is the biggest and most oppressive on my own list of things that are difficult to talk about. I don’t know who clicks their way through here these days and I don’t know who is reading. On this topic, there is bound to be some disagreement. I know very well, and deeply, that I've hurt some in the past. So I live in fear of hurting or offending anyone anywhere ever. I’d rather be the opposite, but fear can be a tricky thing to release.

I’m listening to the first Fleet Foxes album tonight, because it is certainly the time for it, and also I may have mildly overdone the Christmas tunes over the weekend. White Winter Hymnal always takes me back to the winter in my tiny bedroom in Wellfleet. It was adjacent to the dining room and must have been a pantry at some point because it barely fit a twin bed and a dresser and it had no heat. There was always sand on the floor, scattered over the blue green industrial carpet, because it was Cape Cod and the vacuum cleaners rarely were working in that house. There was always sand in the sheets as well, and each night I’d pull back the blanket and brush the sand out. In the winter, when it was very cold, I’d pile on my layers and crawl underneath a thick comforter and bury my head into the pillows. White Winter Hymnal takes me back there.

I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty tonight, the details and minutiae of my former belief and current non-belief. Partly because I just don’t, and partly because so very many of those details have not worked themselves out inside my head.

But this time of year, more than any other, fills me with nostalgia for that lost belief. It feels like a death, like I lost someone I loved once. I find myself longing for the drive on Wednesday evening to the Advent service, for the Advent wreath and candles sitting on the kitchen table, for the magical story of a god becoming human, a baby that would save the world, a virgin birth, a manger and a star. It’s all so fantastical and hope-filled. At this time of year, I long for the innocence of that belief. 

Hymns are deeply ingrained in me. This is strange to admit, perhaps, but sometimes I still listen to hymns. They are familiar and comforting to me in the way that any ritual is.

I don’t write about this often (oh hell, I never write about this). It feels too much like a story I can’t find the words for. It feels like the story I need to save up until I can write something truly great about it, like it needs to be my one great work. And I fear (there it is again) that I’ll give someone false hope, that to your eyes (whomever you are) my writing honestly might mean that just-like-that I’ll slip back into belief.

Well, I said I’d write something different tonight, didn’t I? Didn’t I advise you all to write about those things that feel most prickly under your skin? The urge to wipe all these words away, to delete in a mad fury, must mean that they need to be here on this page…..right?

I like to give answers. I am someone that people ask for advice. But listen. I know so little! In so many ways, I struggle to figure my own shit out (if you don't mind me saying). There’s no moral or other resolution to this story. There’s no kernel of wisdom at the end. I do not know what will come next. The answers are just out of reach. Tis’ the season for sitting still with your own nostalgia and grief and whatever else you hold close. I have to leave it hanging there, as such, because that's the only way I can leave it.