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The Prayer That Got Silence
Isabella, where I stopped asking. The ninth of Eyes Open.
I was raised to pray, so you should know how I lost it, because it did not go the way people think. I did not get angry at God and throw Him out. It was quieter and it took longer and it was worse.
I prayed as a little girl the way they teach you, to the Virgin mostly, because she was a mother and I had lost mine and a girl reaches for a mother. I prayed for it to stop. The thing in the house, the thing behind the shut door I keep telling you I will not open. Night after night, the right words, the way the nuns drilled them into me before my father decided I was done with nuns. I asked the kindest face in the church to make the kindest thing in my house stop being the worst thing, and I asked it correctly, and I asked it for years.
Nothing came. I want to be precise, because this is the hinge of me. It was not that I felt punished. Punished would have been attention. It was that I felt nothing answer, ever, at all, a silence so complete and so patient that after enough years a child does the only logical thing with it and concludes that either nobody is home or nobody who is home cares for the asking. And my father, all the while, had his own God. Oh, he had reasons. Men like him always have the sacred ready. He told me what we did was a kind of duty, dressed it in words that came out of the same book the nuns used, made the worst thing sound like obedience. So I grew up with two religions in one house. The one I prayed to, that said nothing. The one he preached, that never shut up. Guess which one a kid starts to believe is the real one.
By the road I was done. Not loud about it. I did not curse God in the back of a truck. I just had no more asking left in me, because asking is a thing you do when you believe there is an ear, and I had run that experiment more carefully than anything they ever could have taught me in a school, for more years, with better controls, and the result came back the same every single time. Silence. So when the coyotes and the conditioners and the men down the line started reaching for the sacred too, started telling me God's plan and a woman's place and what I was for, I had a thing in me by then that no one could touch, which was a complete and bottomless contempt for any man who wraps what he wants in what God wants. I had heard it from the first one. I heard it from all of them. Different mouths. Same trick. The collar does not change the hands.
That is the part of me that never came back, not in death, not after, not at sanctuary where a good old woman keeps a crucifix on the wall and means it. I can sit in a room with real faith now and not sneer, I have learned that much, because I have met one or two who carry it clean. But put a man in front of me who tells me what God wants while his hands tell a different story, and the oldest, coldest thing in me wakes up, and it is not anger. Anger is hot. This is the temperature of a girl who prayed correctly for years to the kindest mother in heaven and got handed back a silence she could have set her watch by. You only see clear through that kind of dark once you stop expecting a light. I stopped expecting the light somewhere on the road to Veracruz. I have seen everything very clearly since.
