writing

Unbeknownst to me, there is blood dripping down my left leg all night. I am dressed as Lady Macbeth at a house party with a lavish bathroom and a muddy backyard. There isn’t much from that night that didn’t have to be decoded in the daylight afterwards. All I’m sure of is that over the course of a long night, my body had soaked a white nightgown in blood. Due to the copious, and later unkind amount of alcohol I had consumed that night, I did not notice the infliction nor the aftermath until the next morning. I slept awfully and awoke to a small pool of blood. At first, it was thought to be my very early period until I felt a sharp pain. I felt around in the dark until my finger sank into what can only be described as an absence of butt cheek. I drive in silence for 14 minutes to the hospital emergency unit, unsexed with thickened blood.

I am stuck on the parallels to be drawn between my night, in my blood-soaked nightgown, and Lady Macbeth, and her blood-soaked nights. In both drunkenness and sleepwalking, the mind is divided. Bodies continue acting, but the mind is disconnected from actions. We are both consumed by something we cannot control- except in her case, it isn’t alcohol but overwhelming guilt. I played Lady Macbeth in high school for my English Lit class, alongside a Macbeth who smelled heavily of marijuana and Axe deodorant. I felt deeply connected to Lady Macbeth back then, partly because I was grappling with the violence that upholds our patriarchal systems, and partly because I was also a little bit evil. I had felt her presence in me return that night. Lady Macbeth washed invisible stains; I ignored very real ones.

I curled my body into the waiting room seat; the fake leather was soft and already warm from a previous visitor. I tried to write down all my thoughts, decoding my hazy night under the fluorescent spotlight of the ER. A couple makes their way through the sliding front doors of the emergency room. A woman no older than 20, crawling on her hands and knees, followed by her boyfriend, wearing noise-canceling headphones around his neck and a deep annoyance plastered across his face. They get checked in with the triage nurse, and this woman crawls into the seat next to me. I watch her fight through the battle she was losing against the alcohol in her system, and it immediately uneases me. She is swinging her head side to side, bent over, facing her knees, and groaning like an injured animal. She breaks through her boyfriend’s pleas for silence and projectile vomits all over the floor in front of us. I want to comfort her and make everything ok until my body starts moving without my mind. Over the vomit, across the waiting room, and into the washroom, where, following her suit, I spill the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. We unfortunately continue this dance for about an hour, bodies chanting, fluids spilling, time collapsing. She eventually runs out of steam and slumps into her own lap, motionless. She slowly drags her right arm out from underneath her and holds it out to her boyfriend. At this point, I had watched her struggle through sentences and learn that she has a small window for opportunity before the sickness returns. She is choosing her words carefully. She mutters out to her boyfriend, “I need moral support”, her hand still outstretched for his. He glances down, confused at her limp hand, asking her what she wants. She mutters, “You are fucking useless. Headphones on. Now.” and he fumbles through his bag for them. He places headphones on her head and lingers there for a moment until she demands that he play Lana Del Rey. She lies back in the chair, unraveling herself into the music. Few times in my life have I seen anyone as relaxed as she was in that moment.

I’m called in by the nurse and directed to a cubicle with thin fabric walls. I am instructed to change into a hospital gown and wait for the doctor. I put my earbuds in and stare up at the ceiling, watching the air conditioner ripple air down the polyester curtains of my cubicle. The doctor comes in with an attitude I immediately dislike, and I bury my head under the pillow of the hospital bed, and he injects numbness and begins to stitch me back together. A a nurse will be in shortly to bandage my wound, he says.

The nurse enters and we make hilarious banter about my unfortunate injury. If there is one thing I am going to be able to do in this state, with my bare and Frankensteined cheek exposed to the world, it is flirt with my hot nurse. She tells me she’s relieved I came in, and that the 3 stitches are going to help it heal with virtually no scar. I take a moment in silence. Three stitches? Three stitches. Three stitches like The Rule of Three. Like the witches in Macbeth. Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble? If I took anything away from that English Lit class, it was the endless, nuanced dissections of the symbolism within Macbeth. I break the silence between me and the nurse. “Are you serious? Three stitches?” is followed by an interesting hybrid of my laughter and uncontrollable sobs. I have no idea whether everything is coming together or falling apart, but I am what can only be described as completely hysterical. She is now stifling laughter against her face mask and struggling through this conversation, like on a stage with no script. She excuses herself from the room, and I can hear her taking deep breaths right outside the door. She comes back in with teary eyes and gives me the run-down on the aftercare I need for my stitches. I walk out of the emergency room with a bandaged butt and tears streaming down my face. What’s done cannot be undone, but it can be re-stitched.

Not too long ago, I was on a first date and she asked me what my faith was, essentially where I stand spiritually, and I was reminded of my spiritual journey and where it all began.

My first exposure to religion was a brief stint in a summer church camp for kids in my neighbourhood. I grew up living right next to a church, and so my parents, being what my family calls the “unbaptized branch” of our family tree, resorted to the lowest-commitment attempt at exposure for us. They didn’t quite take to organized religion, but they figured they’d give us one shot at having an internal transformation just in case the kingdom of God was within us and just happened to skip a generation or something.

Before this camp, my mom sat my brother and me down and told us, “We might not take to this whole Christianity thing, and we are not required to; however, we are required to respect others and their beliefs”. I lasted a couple of days in this camp before really getting tired of all the songs they made us sing, and so it ended up not being very educational. However, I like to think I got an alternative educational experience through my neighbourhood God Guy.

Unbeknownst to me until recently, not every neighbourhood came with its own God Guy, but ours sure did. Growing up, I lived in one of those small communities where everyone is pretty connected, you know, we had a crossing guard that everyone knew personally and the owner of the candy store wouldn’t make us pay, but instead keep tabs open that I don’t believe were ever actually closed. You also really couldn’t get away with much, the first time I was arrested was when I was 13 by a cop who was also my soccer coach at the time. This was the type of town where parents allowed their kids to run pretty free as long as they travelled in packs, so by 7-8 years old, we were all walking from school together every day and ultimately to the rec centre for free swim on Wednesdays. I was a part of this big group of kids that would walk to the pool together every week. We would encounter God Guy, and he would talk to us about what we thought was Christianity. He would tell us these complex stories involving witches and animals, and a lot about predicting when “The Big One” was coming, but in retrospect it wasn’t really that impressive considering we were all from BC and had been emotionally preparing for continental drift our entire lives. Eventually, he started showing up to the rec centre on Wednesdays for free swim, ready to give his sermon to a bunch of 8 year olds trying to get in line for the slide. I think we were all a bit unsettled because one day, after his wild stories, without consulting each other, we all went home and told our parents about the guy who followed us to the pool to teach us about Christianity. I will never forget the look on my mom’s face because this sounded a lot more concerning coming out of my mouth than it felt in the moment. Our parents spoke to one another and ended up finding out that he is our music teacher’s son, living with schizophrenia.

This is unfortunate and being 7 years old at the time, I was a bit young to understand the complexity of this diagnosis; but it really does explain the messages he was spreading about God. I was explicitly told by my mother not to judge others for their beliefs, so when he told us that he was actually Jesus Christ himself and he had come back to spread the word of the heavenly kingdom, I was pretty accepting of it. He also told us that he could walk on water and grant all the wishes we wanted. He said he could talk to animals, and that at night he would ride deer around the city when everyone else was asleep. Obviously we wanted proof, but he couldn’t talk to the animals around us because we were scaring them, and when they're 1 on 1 there's more trust there, I guess. To this day, that makes sense to me, but I do remember questioning his ability to walk on water, considering we were at the pool with him pretty regularly, and surely he could have proven that.

We ended up seeing less and less of this guy around the neighbourhood, but these interactions really stuck with me as an inquisitive 7-year-old who was also really hammering home the idea that magic is absolutely real and all around us. So whenever I wanted something really badly, completely misunderstanding the concept of religion at this point, I would pray for it. This went on for a good couple of years. At night, I would lie on my back and close my eyes really tight and think about God. I would ask him for a quick favour, to swing by and grant my wishes if he wasn’t too busy with other stuff. The problem was that at this point, I’m not quite sure who to picture when thinking about God. On one hand, I had this abstract idea of a creator in my mind that was completely undefinable and an encapsulation of love and life around us, but on the other hand I’m picturing this man riding a deer through our neighbourhood granting all our wishes and for whatever reason that seemed way more legit. Having Him (capital H) in the neighbourhood made sense to me, it was way easier to get on His good side and ensure your wishes would come true. I think I just leaned into that more than I should have but eventually my spirituality started evolving and it still is, but when answering this beautiful girl who inquired about my beliefs, I told her that I’m a pretty indecisive person, from what I’ve heard all the religions have some really good points and all that, and essentially I have just been picking and choosing the ideas I like from each religion and building my own. Sort of like emptying 7 puzzles together and forcing all the pieces to fit, and it still looks good, you know, just a bit abstract. Through my journey with religion, I’ve realized a big part of almost every religion is community, finding belonging and connection to something larger than yourself, and my story is about the first time I felt that. Connection is everywhere, whether it be found at the church on Sundays, the mosque on Fridays, or the community pool on Wednesdays.