Cassie's first draft

I sat at the park reading Walt Whitman while watching a child sit alone on the swing with no one to push her.

I watched a different girl with her grass-stained knees and Dorito dusted fingers flitter across the grass as she gathered a buttery bouquet. The sun-fallen weeds bunched in her chubby fists. She gave her collection of starbits to her mother, sneezing. "Wow! They're lovely," her mom said, she said she is going to put them in a vase in the kitchen. My kitchen has scab-red roses from Costco. I guess I picked them out too.

I am not nostalgic for childhood innocence. But at one point in my life I exchanged my dad reading The Little Prince to me at bedtime for white noise to drown out my thoughts while I sleep. And I don’t know why.

The month I turned four was the same month of the Columbine High School massacre. That same, tragic morning, I woke up hundreds of miles away with a popsicle swollen wrist from falling out of my bed due to a nightmare. Despite having what we would realize later was a broken arm, I insisted on going on my preschool field trip.

April in Minnesota meant I wore my puffy purple coat with the pom pom fuzz on the sleeves to the zoo. I used the scraggly fuzz to wipe my tears anonymously when the evidence of hurt leaked out of my eyes.

That day isn’t just my first memory of pain, it’s my first memory of managing pain without my mom.

When I got picked up from school, we went to the doctor and I got a Lisa Frank pink cast bound to my arm. My mom pulled out a black Sharpie from her ever-prepared purse and wrote “Mom,” substituting the letter O for a heart.

By the time we drove home, the victims’ names from the Columbine massacre were being shared, one girl had my name. My mom cried so hard she had to pull over the car to keep us safe. Sympathizing with my mother’s tears was as foreign a concept as death to me then. So I sat still.

Like many children, I was born full of helium. I believed that if I put fireflies in a jar at night they would turn into fairies and keep my room safe. I believed that the sun rays that descended from clouds were stairs for Jesus so He could visit Earth. And I believed that my parents could protect me from anything.

My mom stopped crying before she was done feeling sad to continue our journey home. I think that on that drive she and I accepted together that her love for me did not make me invincible.

Realizing my mom’s inability to protect me didn’t make me not believe in her. I still believed she loved me. I still believed she would tell me the truth about which Prom dress made my waist look best. I still knew she would edit my college entrance essays with harsh honesty even with late notice. I still called her when my car stopped running on the freeway and I wasn’t sure what to do next.

I never stopped believing in my mom the way I would, years later, stop believing in God when too many desperate pleas for divine intervention got lost in the mail.

I don’t think I ever stopped believing God heard and answered prayers, just that He stopped answering mine. I stopped believing that everything happens for a reason orchestrated by God (but I still, paradoxically to me, believed in miracles). I stopped feeling guilty that I wasn’t receiving Godly comfort, because I stopped believing the empty space was due to my own spiritual shortcomings.

Still, praying makes me feel like an amputee, reaching for God like a phantom touch.

I’ve tried to be a second coming a thousand times. Looking for signs of God in what feels like self-fulfilled destruction.

On a summer evening, I carried myself into the vastness of air to look from as far as I could climb. I watched as the west reached for clothes of new colors: Oranges, purples, and pinks. In this fuchsia evening, I imagined that my Mother wrote me a love letter of pink clouds. Surrounded by the sea’s powerful ink and a piercing sky, I live in a world of blue. Under the barely perceptible fire of the sky, I felt myself wobble towards hope. My heart longs for pink clouds.

“Bring me the sunset in a cup,” Emily Dickinson says. “Let it be full of cotton candy clouds,” I whisper.

I watch the heavens a lot for someone who never seems to hear back from God.



Sometimes I wonder if God is one of those people who likes to sit in silence in long car trips and feels like that’s bonding. I wonder if God is a Scorpio. I wonder if God is a woman and what She thinks about there being so few women on the Supreme Court. I wonder if God stress bakes like my little sister or if God gets excited to cross things off a to-do list. I wonder if God watched me cry in my car after a doctor’s visit where things didn’t go as planned, and I wonder if God, even though people are suffering far more than I ever have, I wonder if God prays for me to be comforted, the way I’ve prayed for people who didn’t want my help.