“It’s the humidity that’ll get you.”
When your voice reverberates through my mind, that’s how I know to start. My fingers intertwine themselves with this battered rosary and my calloused skin brushes itself against each individual sphere, covering the 59 surfaces as if to make up for lost time. I used to pretend I was praying to you. Dropping to the floor of my room and pleading for mercy, begging for some form of release from your love.
My lips part, allowing me to hail our grace. I am only able to focus on the cracked exterior of the muscles you claimed as yours, savouring the notes of each flavour our mouths presented to each other. You forged our bodies together and sought a higher power, boring through my exterior and embracing the thickness of my blood. The pumping of my heart, the pulsating of my mind, and the depth of my cowardice.
My mother told me to repent, to erase you as if you were an amalgamation of agony or a force of evil. You were my emancipator, the liberator of my mind from fear of flames and the pain of burning as these priests say I will. I was to seek salvation in the beads I clung to, I have been pressed to only look towards the stained glass of these walls and abide by his rules of purity. I only wish to abide by you. By your breath against my neck and your hair against my shoulder.
I wore this dress for you. During our services, my hands would brush against the white lace, only done under the guise of straightening out the fabric. I pretended they were yours and for the sake of balance, I would straighten my bow to combat the way you would untie it. Anything I can do to attempt to be closer to you, to pretend you are here with me, guiding me through this prayer that has been completely engulfed by your absence. An insatiably dry wind sneaks itself through the dead grass of the communal garden, weaving around the rickety pews and blowing against my chest, rattling the cross planted firmly around my neck.
“Would God be forgiving of this love?”
This cross has donned my neck since my 14th Christmas and yet you felt more interwoven into the layers of my skin. Your fingers would grasp the chain encircling my neck and place such a disrespect on it, questioning his capacity for understanding. You spread your poison in the air and positioned me to doubt his love, placing greater trust in your care.
I am unsure if he would forgive the things I did. Each time I bowed down to request his benevolence, my mind would be possessed by your warmth. The glow of another woman, portrayed as something so damnable in its nature, despite the bliss arising from contact. I wish to call you my place of worship. But that does not serve as a testament to your power, to the constraint you have entangled me in. You replaced my former torturer and allowed me to become a victim of my desire.
I would so easily pass judgement on Eve, giving into temptation of such forbidden fruit and succumbing to the lure of her own want. I revoke all previous scrutiny placed upon her or any other woman seen as less than holy as I have revoked upon my own faith. Were you that very serpent? If you were such a creature, I could not hold it against you. I had such little hesitation for your passion.
Throughout this attempted prayer, there is a yearning for the shared silence we once had. An appreciation for the effortless way you were able to capture my gaze when I was so easily dissuaded from any other. Our sanctuary was hidden among the throes of nature that it seemed as if God had crafted it specifically for us, that he knew what we were doing was worth protection. I would repeat this to myself as a justification for your lips against mine. I kneel against the hardwood floor of this church; the aching of my knees travels through my nerves to rejuvenate my senses.
“Georgia. Two weeks.”
Did it get to you? The heat? Or did you simply possess too much guilt about how desperately I needed you? It’s unfair of me to be so cruel to you when all you gave to me was insight and worship, as if I was your own saviour, undeserving of such admiration. Perhaps after this failed plea, I can return to our sanctuary, that abandoned house, only serving as a solitude for spiders and mites. You would say they were there for us, that we could raise them as our own and perhaps allow society to accept them for who they were as we wished they could do for us.
When I return to that house, I will allow my tears to baptise me once more and ruminate on how I could have made you stay. How I should have allowed this cross to plant itself on the ground and adhere to your words. There was such an adamance in your ideology that if it was meant to be, it would be. Would that not apply to our love? Would we not have met if we were not meant to be? I have learnt to be selfish in this time away from you and therefore morphed into such an antithesis of the girl you once held. I no longer pray to be forgiven or for blessings, instead I find myself praying for you.
I will abuse this faith I have and take advantage of his compassion, hoping the heat of my town is too severe to pay much mind to what I am wishing for. In the beginning, I would pray for you to return. I would fantasise about the girls you found to replace me and how they would never be as darling as me. Anger would serve as fog to my intention and when it subsided, I urged your tenderness to come forth once more.
So, today I will pray that you are in good health as I have done every other day this June. I will ask for goodwill and satisfaction to seep into your hands so you may also pray for me. I pray that you ask him for this weather to deter, so others may feel the relief of coolness and experience the alleviation that I inherited from you. Even when you reside across an endless river. Even when God will look down upon us. I shall worship the blessing granted to me of your voice. I shall worship the blessing granted to me of memory.
I shall worship you.
