Bath Time

07/25

“I think I’m an atheist now,” I said to the girl. It was bath time, and that’s one of the only places I took the time to keep quiet and listen to her. I waited.

She was thoughtful a moment, and didn’t reply right away. I could see the emotion filling her face like a cup under a faucet as it dawned on her too, now that the words were said out loud.

“I think you always have been,” She said quietly, and continued, “All those nights of sleepless, desperate prayer, was it really faith or the fear of being cut off? Oh god,” she cried, her eyes really glassy now, “You are an atheist! Now we’re untethered—why’d you say it out loud? I always thought we’d find mooring again eventually, but you really are alone now, aren’t we?

“I wish we could believe again. I miss belonging, now that I think of it. I miss belonging to something more than my body.” The tub filled with tears, her legs dangling out the side of it as she went on, her small dimpled hands not bothering to wipe her snotty face, “we can never go back though, can we? I wish I could force myself back into that shape, so I could please them all again. I loved to please them all. I miss the line we walked, like I could gauge our holiness by my deeds, like that actually determined divinity. That clarity. The belonging, will we ever feel that again?” The tub overflowed and my feet got wet as I sat on the toilet seat watching her.

“Shush,” I chided, “you’re romanticizing it all. Don’t you remember slamming your head into granite from the weight of it? You couldn’t bear the gaze of God, don’t pretend like you want it now. I don’t see you slicing your skin when you falter now, do you? None of it was real, and you know we’re better off,” but my voice hitched on the last word and I conceded a little, “Okay, the love was there, some of the time, but we’ve seen how conditional it all turned out to be.”

“But I wish we could follow the rules again,” she said. I could see defeat in her. “Just to get a sliver of sunshine and a divine pat on the head for it, and we’d be so grateful for it. Do you remember?” She was wistful and then, “Instead now, where there’s only somehow finding the strength to accept there never was a rule book, and the sun shone either way. Do we have that strength?

“It was a cage—I know it was, but at least we knew the way around it, and at least there were friends inside who craved the same shitty wafers they fed us, ha!

“We actually believed those over–produced colourless crackers brought us as close to God this side of heaven gets, just because they’ve been saying the same rhyme beforehand for millennia.” She was getting worked up now, and I could feel us merging, like double vision righting itself.

Equally as fast she deflated, water swilling around her. “Do we have that strength?”

A whisper.

A sigh, and, “Yes, we are and will be just fine. Let it be what it was,” I answered her in my new found wisdom, feeling phoney. I watched her stifle a shiver, always trying to be stoic, and so I lifted her pickled body out of the brine and wrapped her in a warm towel and put her to bed with a cup of warm honeyed milk, which I knew was her favourite.