On November 1st I turned 33. My friend Regina Watts called it “The Jesus Year.”
33 years is enough time to start a religion that changes the infrastructure of society, enough time to make the world weep forever for the moment you die. The nails that drove those wrists into a piece of wood were more powerful than the atomic bomb.
But it still doesn’t feel like enough time. 33 years is nothing. 33 years doesn’t even register in the eyes of the universe. Redwood trees will have grown on the eyelashes of God before he can even blink. Another blink and the human race has died. Ash has buried all of our electrical wires and libraries. The sun will have blown through the planets and cooled into a dark core. It’s never enough time.
Then again, it never does feel like enough time.
I have often wondered what it’d be like to die, but in my dreams I usually suffocate underwater. Or I drink a poisoned margarita and vomit my heart up in the bathroom, my sweaty face pressed against the toilet lid. I rarely imagine what it’d be like to be crucified.
But I do imagine the worst pain would be after the nails had been driven in and the cross set upright, my body trying to pull itself down into the earth, each hour moving me closer to a death that’s suddenly not coming fast enough. My god, my god, why have you forsaken me? In bible study and in seminars people used to emphasise how cruel and awful Jesus’s death was. It was so special and profane to die in that way, to feel the profound emptiness of God’s absence on that hill.
But Jesus died the death of a common criminal. The point of his death wasn’t that it was special. It was ordinary. So goddamn ordinary. My god, my god, why have you forsaken me? We all die without the knowledge of a special presence. We all die alone.
The ordinary life of a human being is an unknown and unfathomable cruelty to a god.
The ordinary life of a human being is unknown and cruel even to us.
I used to be terrified of death. 33 may be the first year that the thought of dying doesn’t keep me up at night, its fangs on my neck. My daughter probably has a lot to do with that. For the first time in my life I realized that I could exist beyond the borders of my consciousness.
33 would be a good year for an old self to die, so a new one can be born.
Other than that, I don’t attach any special significance to the year 33. 33 is the atomic number of arsenic and the modern Russian alphabet contains 33 letters. And according to Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali everyone in heaven is eternally 33. It’d be a good year to live forever. I’m still young enough to do a burpee and get carded at the grocery store, but I’ve cast off the easy existential angst of youth.
Baby fat gone. Baby stretchmarks in. I used to write in 24 hour coffee shops at 2 A.M. because I had no home to go back to. Now I write with my daughter Samantha strapped to my chest, hoping that when she’s older the sound of the keyboard will remind her of warmth, safety, sleep.
In celebration of turning 33, here’s 33 things that I want but have never dared to hope for.
I want a family that I will never see as my enemy. A family that never turns on each other.
I want a daughter that is fed on love and never has to be starved of compassion. She will never know she needed it because she’s never had to do without.
I want to see the mysteries that I have hidden from my own eyes
I want to write enough books that a teenage girl can spend an entire month getting lost in them. Cool November nights, windowpane frosted, warm bedsheets, and a stack of Autumn Christian novels.
I want to be a great writer. I want the words that I write to be heated at the edges. When they’re read aloud I want the pressure on them to feel so tight that they’re ready to break. I want to write dangerous words. I want reality to come screaming through them.
I want to sleep and wake without nightmares that have me sobbing, my chest a cave.
I want to feel completely in control of myself and stop abdicating responsibility for my own life
I want to look in the mirror and see what I actually look like.
I want everyone I love to become better because I love them
I never want to feel like the things I have chosen are a burden that I’m helpless to control
I want to have a home that is open to creatives, artists, interesting people. I want my home to be a hub of activity and discussion. A true “safe space.”
I want to be able to look people in the eyes without feeling like I’m going to flinch waiting for the blow.
I want to have hair that goes down to my waist.
I want to become bored of my own fears and come up with new ones
I want to love without it hurting me.
I want to stop putting my pain on a grand pedestal of worship. Like Jesus, I want to own the ordinariness of my own suffering.
I want to understand that I am something greater than myself. I am the cathedral built out of everyone around me. I am an ocean of skin and glass. An eternal reflection.
I want to stop taking the easy way out.
I want to stop letting the fear of becoming someone better prevent me from becoming someone better. I want to stop letting the loss and the grief guide me into deeper pits of hell, round and round, until I’m frozen, glacial, in the center of my self imposed misery.
I want to stop dragging my past behind me like a corpse
I want to embrace the chaos of the unknown and let the excitement of the strange propel me forward
I want to speak loudly and confidently. I want to keep my shoulders straight. I want to meet the world with my eyes like it belongs to me. I want to know that I am not an accident.
I might not ever stop feeling like an alien among humans, but I want to at least become a good approximation at being human.
I want to stop going to anger as my first emotion
I want to stop fantasizing about everything that could go wrong. I want the fantasies to stop feeling like prophecies.
I want to stop being so afraid of what insipid, worthless, weak people think about me, my thoughts, my writing. I want to stop letting the criticism bother me. I want to aim for the truth regardless of what other people do.
I want to stop thinking that other people will be the solution to all my problems.
I want the perfect leather jacket
I want to be a good wife
I want to move through each day like I accomplished what I set out to do
I want to stop telling myself grandiose narratives of pain, and start dreaming up new ways to hope.
I want to never acquiesce to failure. I don’t want to come up with self delusional narratives that make me think my own failure is okay.
Every day I wake up I want to see the world born anew in your eyes. Again and again.
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teenage girl curling up on my couch in the cool november sun reading this & tearing up here. thank you for your words. much love💗
Beautiful piece, Autumn.