Thursday, March 20, 2014

letter to mother

Dear Mother, 

I came out to you 2 years ago in a letter I had written, on the night I took the Admissions Test. I had been rehearsing what to write for several months; where to begin, how to introduce the topic, in which part of the letter it would be. When the night finally came to write it out, however, I put aside my scratch paper and just let the words flow. It felt like pumping water out of a well: a few spurts of forcefulness, a few spurts of ease, and gravitational physicality in between. But I completed it in a few hours and mailed it to you the next day. 

I cried as I wrote, and little balls of tears rolled down my cheeks, splashed across the length of legal pad paper and bounced off, momentarily, in the shape of an embossed water crown. They must be wrinkled now, those edges, if you look at them carefully. But you can spare yourself that inspection and do more important things with your time.

In that letter, I remember, I asked you, specifically, not to internalize the nature of my identity as something you and Daddy did 'wrong' and requested you not to look at my sexuality as your fault -as anyone's fault. I realize that this can be hard, especially when I see kids in the playground with their wrists clamped gently around their parents' silk finger-tops, that raising a child screams responsibility and requires exposure, often inadvertently, to a catalog of social pathogens, unfavorable circumstances and contestable situations. I realize that the product of parenthood morphs into a human formula, and that along the way faults and responsibilities and feelings of ownership for deviance cannot be avoided. But I still hoped that you would understand that my being queer has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you, even while the rest of society, the radical feminists, the academics and the politicians included, hypothesize and argue back and forth between the unknown effusions of nature and nurture into the funnel of the developing brain. 

If nature wins, there is then a political legitimacy, a social hands-off: it wasn't me, it was the DNA, and if nurture wins then there is cause for dystopia, silent support for social cleansing, for territorial eugenics on behalf of the social conservatives to reinstate the "natural order" of things, bolstered by Biblical kingdom, unforgiving theology and the cataclysm of Darwinian fitness. If we have a conjunction of both elements spilling into the foundation of sexuality, into the moot point of the histology of desire, what tug-o-war man will play to politicize human rights, uphold equality labels and make profits from a psychological quandary, I cannot even imagine. But as long as the answer -if you believe in a concrete scientific agenda, that is -remains contested, suffice it to say that the twinings of my inner erotic, emotions and aesthetics have origins in me, and in me alone, the frazzled territory to which you gave birth, and does not involve you. At all.

Towards the end of the letter I wrote "please call me if you want to talk about it." But you never did, neither of you, and it made me very sad, tacit and extremely embarrassed about myself. The reason I wanted you to call was not that there was anything new to add or particular to deny but that I wanted to explain to you the nature of my life in a society you have never seen. The nature of my life beyond boundaries you have constructed based on pop culture and Hollywood and contrast it against the sawdust of grievances that corrugate and spark anger in your own neighborhood. I wanted to tell you that I am happy overall, that I found myself on the edge of an enormous breakdown and that I picked myself up and found the support to waddle through days as a first-time queer. They never talked about us, people like me, through all the years in Catholic school, where the boys locked eyes, kissed at night and gave blowjobs to each other behind grease-capsuled food stalls. The revelation of my tendencies, the awakening of senses, therefore, came utterly unprecedented, wrapped in a confusion, in a hasty metastasis of self-loathing and second-guessing and in a cancerous aversion that I didn't know how to make sense of.

I sometimes wonder how you reacted when you first read my letter. Maybe you were in the living room, your arms rested against the coffee table, gazing at the fish tank and sweating through your temples. Or maybe you were by my nightstand, staring at the piano, adjusting your frames and blowing your nose. Or maybe you were at the kitchen table, frothing your coffee, rattling some ice cubes by the swooshing of the record player. Maybe you bawled, maybe you whimpered, maybe you smiled and knew this was coming. Or maybe you froze in the middle of the backyard, while the honey breeze of sweet mangoes clucked at your ears. Maybe it really didn't matter to you, because I had been on my own for seven years by then, and we had drifted apart like 2 melting icebergs in the middle of our own realities. We had forsaken, mutually, the status of mother and son, on the ream of a violent disagreement and on the turn of the century, became 2 private individuals on a facade of business -caring sometimes, chatting sometimes and existing beyond accountability. Despite how broken we are, I thought I should let you know because this has become fundamental to who I am and if you thought of the vignettes of a once-upon-a-time son, you should know that your child wants to love boys, passionately. It would complete the emotional portrait of your Midwestern lovechild, who spent half of middle school cross-dressing in a closet, masturbated to Hustler at the age of eleven, had role playing fetishes with Joey the mechanic and yearned to be fucked by a gaggle of gays at the 2 am raves in Towbridge Court. 

Your picture of me is of my era of morality, studious, principled, and intoxicatingly religious. But the chunk of me that I wanted to show you in my letter is that of the national criminal, who breathes heavily, the aroma of sunshine, prances around fields of honeysuckles and bees, dreams of a husband, a reformed Semitic and jangles his mind with the politics of identity. I am also a human, you know, just like any other person, capable of loving and smiling and singing, and breathing and learning and educating. But a difference remains in the commodity that is me -the difference that you may have guessed, scrolling through hours and hours of Internet logs or periodic screen pop-ups sprouting from viral fenestrations in the memory chip of your computer, that that typified the nature of my violence, my menacing yearnings, the cavernous outcome of my dangerous desires.

You are probably shaken, feel uprooted and think that you have failed your responsibility, whatever that may entail, as a dutiful mother. Perhaps, you want to protect me, with words and love, and cradle me to silence as I whimper, seismically, at the peninsula of injustices. You want to hug me and kiss me and re-tell me the stories about the big bad world. You want to be by my side and touch my cheeks and talk about doctoring, the riskiness of bare sex and the untimely death of Melanie Gerschel. And I will sit and listen in silence, as the phonetics of your words needle my ears, and stir within me a pantheon of thoughts, lickerish and severe, an hippodrome of burning animals, raunchy temptations and sadomasochism, stimulating the tentacles of underground sexuality -only to wake up on a Sunday morning to a buffet of drugs, hallucinations and self-pity. I admire and respect your ability to protect, to love like a lover and bark like a father. But the way we dealt with our ideological flora, the variegations and nit-picky microfilaments, de-magnetized our stances a long time ago. We are threadbare in our present time, you in your concrete pink in a pit of poverty and me in a cubicle, woven with starlights, chandeliers and hope.

Do you know how it feels to be an identity criminal? No, you don't. But I do, because I love boys, sweet harmless boys. I am a criminal in the land where I breathed my first, learned to walk and said your name for the very first time. I have no rights, I have no say, I have no audacity to show my love because I am a delinquent, an uncharismatic wrongdoer in the panoply of culture. If I were to reveal, even a tiny sliver of my affection, I could, in theory, be handcuffed away, confined in a cell with the vortex of laws -and why? Because my fundamental rights do not matter. Because yet again, my desire constitutes a minority, alien, unnatural compared to everyone else's. They say -but it is only the conservatives who think that way, to which I say, but does that change the fact that I am still a criminal? You talk about liberalism, about outrage to tradition -well, then show it! Show it to me! Scream at my face you are welcome here as much as I am! Howl at my senses you can love whoever you want and we will not jail you, we will not victimize you, we will not burn the reputation of your family! I feel homeless at home, and severely bruised. And when you write to me and say "come back home and serve your people" I scoff out loud and clasp my hands so hard that my thumb nails bleed. My vessels burn with the anger in my blood, the shame! the outrage! They say, give it some time, the wheels are already turning, but there is no going back for me; no energy or desire left in me to fight relentlessly. I have ceded responsibility. Call me a cop-out, call me weak. Maybe I am, and regretfully so, but I will leave the pall bearing to other heady activists. Feeling homeless at home -it makes me choke.

I have a lover now. A curious doctor-to-be, from Burlington, Vermont -a historian, a philanthropist with a wide-open window. You will probably never accept a husband for me, ever, even though you responded to my letter saying "I don't really care. Do whatever makes you happy." So we never talk about it or even come close to questionable territory. The politics of my identity, however, does not end with the bigoted jurisdiction of your paralyzing subcontinent. Even in the cavity of the dangerously civilized, across the permeating sands of the wild far West, on the plateau of the corporate and the cafeteria of the powerful, matrimony is a contest. 

A few months ago, they said history was made. You probably read about it in the daily Telegraph or heard about it on the radio, while driving to work. The agents of law decided to redefine marriage, sloughing off the part about a man and woman exclusively. This winnowed into Americans a crisp odor of justice and raised among them a thunderous cheer. But when you break it does to the basics along state lines, the legitimacy shudders and the confusion of identity politics is put in place. Think about a situation like this where my lover and I marry in New York, and make our home on Central Park West, with Dora our child and us as dads. If we go to Indiana to visit Marsha Eckstein or Cayla Schwartzberg, our relationship becomes illegitimate and Dora has no legitimate parents. But if we drive away to Illinois to visit Beverly at school, we are "married" again and Dora has parents. Can you imagine how confusing and unfair this must be for a child born into non-traditional families, growing up in a society that chooses to make gashes and poke holes like this in queer people's lives? No one has and ever will question your marriage. Not like you are in a mother-now-friend-next situation, but I hope that the laws change and that my lover and I and little Dora can live like anybody else -as humans first and then as gays. 

Suffice it to say that I am a little confused by some of the social mores of my adopted home. When I heard opportunity and freedom, the bedrocks of this land, I had imagined a utopia in a civic society of progressive minds, and the liberty of enjoying the celebration of identity. But that, I realize, was the voice of my naivete and I have learned to adapt to the eyes of judgment, the reality of a nation, that prides itself a Gargantuan, the developmental magnate, the power pool of humanity. What meaning is there in a "developed" land that still contests its humans rights? That, to me, defeats the foremost tenets of being a developed welfare. It feels like insidious advertising, like a marketing lure -come here, and be free, as we squeeze out your rights of an alien identity, as an immigrant, a gay and a man of color.

Despite all this, I am happy overall. I have a place that I call home on 82nd Street and Park Avenue. I have a lover who brings me joy, immense happiness and comfort. And I am happy that the politics of this land made me challenge establishments, practice everyday anarchism and question what is existing. I attribute a lot to my liberal arts education, for which I am forever grateful. But how do I answer a boy from your globe who envisions only happiness when he thinks about America? He expects freedom, acceptance and the glamor of identity. He finds an outlet in the history of this land -I can run away from my criminal reality and seek asylum in America. What do I tell such a boy who asks -I want to breathe, can I come to you? I do not know yet, but I will think about it. But let this be known to you and to everyone else that no child is born criminal, your society makes him one. 

Hope you are doing well.

Sincerely,

T.




Thursday, March 13, 2014

my letter to Marsha Eckstein

Marsha,

I saw someone in the 73rd Street Deli last night, who looked just like you; or I should say the way I remember you looking three years ago. I froze for a second and panicked, probably, wondering if I should say Hello. I did not, however; knowing that if you were in New York City from Livingston, Illinois, you would've probably made a phone call or let me know that you were here.

But we've been in touch, and that's important. We chatted via text messages at first and then moved to e-mails. From time to time, you sent me letters, postcards and greeting cards that I read out loud, smiled gleefully and stuck to my yellow plasterboard wall with lime green push pins. I've wanted to write back, for almost 3 years now, but every time I sat down at my cherry-maple desk I either felt lazy, or didn't know how to begin or just couldn't translate my thoughts into words. So I gave up, each time, and walked away, feeling heavyhearted and sincerely defeated, and played card games with Billie Jean in her apartment on Hastings Road. Or went to the Opera with Stanton and Alexa or the Koch Theater with Mary Jane and Martin Pillsbury.

You have been extremely particular about keeping me updated on your whereabouts, your sing-a-long's, your countryside Mad Libs and the deep, dark truths of your inner womanhood. Your stories of desire, of heart break, of insecurities and embarrassments -you have told me without reins. Your lust for life, your tingling genitals, the vapor on your breasts and the thunderous, noisy bellowing of you rain-washed vagina -you have conveyed through alliterations of words. I could sit down and make pencil sketches of the pivot points of your emotions, like a Ferris wheel in a rubber fulcrum or a wooden swing in air ballet, and scribble around the graphing sheet in severe disarray. You are everywhere at once, and then maturely collected, pocketed into a tungsten bulb, and smashed into pieces. And then you are a nothingness, you are a nobody, a theoretical non-existence. How does this happen Marsha Eckstein? Tell me, why does this happen? You are in my mind, a lot of the time, while I'm working, or swimming in the ocean or biking past Grand Central terminal. A lot of the time, when I'm reading Homer or creating art or simply walking across Central Park. It is, as if, you are bare-exposed; naked in my eye of personal knowledge and uncovered from a sheaf of deadly monograms. You wanted love, you craved to be wanted, for years and years on end, even at the cost of jobs, professions and quasi-relationships. But if there is one thing I have never told you before, is that I cannot love you. 

You may, again, wonder why that is. You may, again, feel crushed like a candlewick, ridiculed and humiliated, despite the manner of your endeavors. You may feel cheated and violated at the revenue of circumstance -but I cannot love you. Why not? You will ask. I have given everything, said everything, done everything I possibly could -and yet, why are you not satisfied? You may say. The answer lies not in what you have or have not done -but in the fact that I have found love in my inner queer. An inner queer that gets projected onto the calligraphy of my desire, the faculty of my sexual prowess. It is a category, a denomination and a delineation that I have struggled with, and battled with since my age of eleven. And experimented and pretended and miraculously succeeded even, though only for a short while, to live in a cage of facetiousness. To live in a cage of theater gongs, to reside in a lie and to make promises without meaning them. Lisa Weinberg was a former, the one I knew would be my friendly wife, without the passion for romance, or the art of lovemaking. She was a friendly lover, an ex-corporate, transactional in the nature of our conversations and kissing. To be a token, scared of the single life, holding hands and wrestling, internally, the calling of lesbians and the queers.

The reason I am writing this to you today, this little sliver of my thought chronology, is that I want you to find love in a man who can love you back in the way you deserve. You are central to the development of hormonal adults, in your job and at your church, and the outcome of your perseverance and keen concern will be the epigram to success of many many people. I want you to smile, and be happy in life, flutter and float like a bird in the sky, cheer and scream to the heavens that you believe, holding hands, tapping shoulders and kissing under the canopy of eternal sunshine. With your lover on your neck, a ring on your hand and a marble of motherhood perched on your bed, you will be wonderful and invigorating and the answer to a prayer.

Let us sit and discuss, come September, Marsha Eckstein. Till then, farewell.

Best, 
T.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Ash Wednesday

Hey there, Lucille,

How are things going with you, ex-neighbor? Did everything go as planned with the move? Damian and I walked by your building the other night when it was about to start snowing and peeked through the glass double doors. Gosh, it's so beautiful Lucille and oh my god, the doorman's so sexy. I actually waited in front of the entryway for about 5 minutes, pretending to discuss Sudanese politics with Sherine Levinsky on the phone, and totally checked him out, ha ha. You're living the dream, my little pumpkin. So many people fantasize, for years, of having a Fifth Avenue address and I'm so happy for you that your hard work is paying off. Perhaps five years down the line, you'll be a Society lady, tip-toeing across Manhattan in your Weitzman heels, decorating your home with Tiffany crystals and polishing your face in unreal charades. Or maybe you'll be the small-town Lucille, the Lucille I know -happy and satisfied with small things in life, appreciative of simplicity and quintessentially poise.

You know, my grandma, Jocelyn Horowitz, used to live in the penthouse of your building and was there for 32 years. After Lenny died of cardiac arrest, and her affair with the massuer, Eli Margolin, ended, she moved across the country and resettled in San Diego, in a lovely beach home in La Jolla Village. Maybe you, Eric, Aaron, Melanie and I can plan a little vacation there this summer.

I ran into Tom and Patricia this morning at the Peacefood Cafe on 82nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Remember Tom and Patricia Abberton from Perry Hall? We chatted for a bit about his material engineering courses at Columbia, Patricia's new job at Morgan Stanley and the Dave Eggers title I was reading called What Is The What. I was slightly taken aback when I first spotted them at the opposite edge of the counter top because I never would've thought they were religious or the church-going type. There they were, standing by the scone rack, chattering away and smiling occasionally, with 2 ashen thumb strokes chalked across their foreheads; one vertical, one horizontal, intersecting as a cross. It looked freshly done, but the tail ends were already narrowing with the sweat and their unusual hair-fixation tic. I presume they stopped by St Gregory's for the morning service, but then again I don't particularly keep track of their day-to-day whereabouts.

Just before they were about to head out Tom asked, "So, you giving up anything for Lent?" I laughed a little and said, "No, ha ha. I'm not Christian or religious for that matter. What about you guys?" Patricia said she was giving up desserts and Tom said cigarettes -both of which sounded reasonable. In the middle of the conversation, I glanced at the wall clock by the espresso counter and it was already 9:30 am. I needed to hurry up to be able to reach work on time. The M66 crosstown bus ride takes about 32 minutes and then there's a 14 minute walk. I paid for my coffee and bag of muffins, shook their hands and said, "Happy Ash Wednesday guys and also Happy Easter if I don't see you before that." They wished me Happy Easter as well. I slung the messenger bag over my shoulder, draped my scarf around my neck in a Parisian knot and stumbled my way out to the 79th Street subway.

One of the things I never told you about when we were at Goldman together was that I went to a Catholic school, kindergarten through 12th grade. It was of the Jesuit order, a burnt down theater space converted to a school building in 1863, educating boys, only, for years on end. St. Ignatius Collegiate School had a reputation for upholding strict traditions, churning out dedicated and respectable Catholics and helping students become 'mature, spiritually-oriented men of character.' They believed that 'the Catholic school is a learning community animated by the Divine Spirit of Love and Freedom, and living the Gospel values. It shares Christ's concern for the liberation and fullness of life of all peoples, especially of those in greatest need.' They admitted, however, a fair number of non-Catholics every year, true to their Educational Policy which stated "young people of any religious family find scope within their own cultural milieu to reflect on their lives in the light of their faith and to develop not only in knowledge and skills but also in wisdom which is the fruit of reflection on life and its lessons." I was one of them.

I didn't really care much about Jesuit values, attending weekly catechism or knowing anything about Catholicism till about 9th grade. I was raised Hindu till a certain age, then asked to choose what I wanted to believe. My beliefs collapsed shortly after, and I became an agnostic, and continued to be one for a very long time. During my phase of agnosticism, I had made a lot of really close friends, many of them Catholics. We kept religion out of our day to day conversations, our day to day lives. Whenever they needed to go for Mass, or confessions or other religious commitments, they would politely excuse themselves and slip away. I would stand in the hallway, the one close to the playground, and gaze at my reflection on the green polished tiles and look up to see them walk towards the stained glass corridors, smiling and laughing, chirping and beaming, and dissolve into the distance. They all looked very happy, like genuinely happy, apparently sincere, and soon embraced a culture that helped them feel worthy and re-congeal as a united entity. I, on the other hand, felt really left out; unwelcome to the brotherhood of Catholic boys, which had come to be such a defining part of their lives. I knew very well that I wasn't one of them, blaming it on my unfortunate fate, but shortly after, I knew that I wanted to be, really badly.

I could've bonded more with my non-Catholic friends, or attempted to anyway, and do random activities perhaps, like talk about agnosticism or cute college boys, discuss soccer, cricket or neighborhood chess clubs, but I didn't and I don't know why. I guess the reason was that I felt really root-less as a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, a lot of the time. I felt like a misfit, constantly, and started to become dissatisfied with my surroundings. I felt unusually cornered in an otherwise welcoming environment that scrunched me into a darkening tunnel space. This fear, or stance, or whatever else you want to call it, was probably something I constructed entirely in my own head, cared about too much and dramatized without any concrete bases. But the desire that I had to become part of the "Catholic boys club" was overbearing and strong, compressed like a metal spring ready to stretch, roll out its arms and pounce and leap in a quizzical release, crashing to an end in the midst of a calm whorl of silence.


On the morning of Ash Wednesday, back when I was 15, I walked up to Malcolm George after Biology class and said, "Hey man, what's going on after school today? Aaron, Josephine, Kartik and I are going to The Dandelions to hang out. Do you think you, Crystal and Sebastian can make it?" Apology clouded the rim of his eyes. His pupils narrowed and became shamefully dark. He shook my hand, patted my back and said, "I'm sorry man, we have to attend evening Mass today at St Paul's and then have a registry meeting for Easter services. You guys should go ahead and have fun." My jaws made a violent twitch, and hatred pierced me unflaggingly. I was pissed, I was angry and I took it really personally. Why were my plans, my invitations, pushed around, always, behind stupid and meaningless religious commitments? When I think about that time now, I realize how silly and immature and irrational I used to be, but when you're a heady 15 year old agnostic, who has completely unfounded personal theories about agnosticism and religion, there's very little that you can justify without having your hormones do the talking. You don't understand why they choose Jesus over your dinner invite, and even if you did, you choose not to understand it. But that incident came to serve as my ultimate tipping point, and I knew exactly what the solution was going to be. I was going to be Catholic.


I showed up to mass next day in school, much to everyone's surprise, wearing a crisp white poplin shirt, tailored white pants, a dark blue and white striped tie, and my Buddy Holly-style brown plastic frames. I gelled my hair to a side part, sprayed cologne and wore deodorant and carried with me a mini-Bible that I found in the library 2 hours prior. I sat in the last row of the entire chapel and heard murmurs of "What's he doing here?" spread across the pews; first like ripples of water waves, then like a Mexican wave and finally fleeting like wildfire. I had done some homework the night before: looked up 'How to be a Catholic' on catholic.org, drank wine from a plastic goblet, read about the Eucharist and memorized the Apostle's creed. When the choir started singing and the priest walked down the aisle, I will admit, however, that I felt very nervous. What if I got caught? What if they punished me? And then I thought, the priest has never met me, he doesn't know who I am, I could very well be the new kid in school, or even a new Catholic;  no one would want to see a baptism certificate in the middle of Mass. I must have looked really confused or nervous, however, because someone to my right nudged me a few times and asked me if I was doing okay. I said I was, and that I was just taking it all in.


The hymns were easy to follow. I didn't know the words by heart but I had the book open in front of me. One of the things you probably don't know or care about is that Christmas carols and hymns, in general, have a very simple, predictable melodic structure. They all follow the very basic principles of music theory, without altering any of cadences, and the verses just keep repeating the same tune over and over. I couldn't sing them well, I shall admit, but I could easily hum them and predict how the songs would end. An astonishing number of people around me had them memorized, and had a very forgiving and sincere look on their faces when they sang. Their eyes were squeezed to a rolling crease, lips gently parted, head slightly tilted, and breaths like riots spiraled the sanctuary. When it was time for the Eucharist, I did not hesitate one bit to get up and stand in line. I looked around, saw what others were doing, and when my turn came, I said Amen, the priest slid a wafer on to my tongue, we both bowed and then I left to go back to my spot. For the first time, in a while, I felt good and happy, sprinkled with this sense of inexplicable accomplishment. A sense of belonging had overtaken me that morning, and I left the chapel, content and satisfied, with a wide smile on my face. 


I told Malcolm, in the following few weeks, that I was gradually starting to see why he was so forthright about his religious commitments. Sometimes he would say, "You want to attend Mass tonight with Carrie and Christina and then hang out for a bit at Flurys?" I would smile and say yes. And this went on for a while -for almost 2 years. I was the new Catholic in the parish, who regularly confessed, learned all the hymns and dedicatedly prayed. I prayed every single day, can you imagine Lucille? Sometimes even multiple times a day. For courage, power and strength like Loretta Bradner had asked me to do. Daddy would drop me off at the church on Sunday mornings with the notion that I was playing the piano for the services. Of course I had lied to him. He was thrilled that I was getting more musical exposure and I was overjoyed with my new clout, my Catholic brothers and sisters, and the novelty of it all. I was not a minority anymore -can you picture this, Lucille? I had a straight face, was apparently devout and restlessly religious. 


Things finally went downhill after 2 things happened. Malcolm left St Ignatius because his family was relocating to a different continent, a different country, a different city. They ended up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. New opportunities, both fiscal and social, lured the George's to the Southern Belt. We lost touch after a few weeks of his leaving; I'm sure he found new friends, some real Catholics and a vast new space to adventure and explore. Tracy Swanson, from the Regent's Society, mentioned last Thursday that he's an administrative assistant, now, in the department of Geophysics at Remington, and has been for the past 3 years. His leaving, however, had really pinched my intentions. Why am I doing this? I often asked myself. Was it because I was in love with someone who would never know or never care? Because I wanted to do things to be around all the time, and enjoy the company? That was probably a large part of it, but then there was another thing. My prayers had turned extremely material-driven. It was like I was testing God every day -if you exist somewhere out there and are listening to my prayers, then you will make me get an A in the quiz tomorrow. Or it would be about winning a prize, getting money or a new sweater as a gift. The longer this didn't happen the angrier I became, and the angrier I became the more I prayed for immediate gratification of things. Where my logic ran away, or my rational edge, I do not know. But I felt annoyed, all the time Lucille; I felt completely betrayed and defeated by a God that I tried to believe in. So when Ash Wednesday came around, in 11th grade, and Anthony Mendonca asked me if I wanted to attend service, I peered into his face, completely crestfallen, and said, "I'm done." 


You know, Lucille, I realize that the entire phase was an outcome of infatuation, of wanting attention and being completely irrational. And I realize, very well, that religion is not about rewards, prayers are not about gifts, and confessions are not about being the trendy thing to do. I mishandled religion to gain personal favors, and I do not know what the retribution is. Isn't it interesting that I believe in retribution without being religious or spiritual? But what I do know is that because of the 2 years, I cannot look at religion, think about it or believe in it, the way others can. There's a stain, a serpentine trail of squalor and filth that rains in my brain, every time I think about it. And I cannot get over it, just as yet. Maybe someday, in the distant future, the metal cast of atrocious lies, will wince away from my inner self, and then I will come out a better person. 


This has become a lot longer than I had intended to be and I'm sorry about that. Stay in touch, my little pumpkin and tell Edna Weinglass I said hello. 


Yours,

T.