My Voice Over His

In the Beginning 

I went to a Christian elementary school that taught me A. God loves me and B. God can send me to hell. 

I tread in the unfriendly waters of this paradox until I was drowning.  

I questioned, 

And my questions were met with raised eyebrows and Biblical text, 

So, I stopped questioning. 

Instead, I prayed,

Meticulously and with tenacity, and, above all, with all-consuming fear. 

Most nights I was in elementary school I suffered severe anxiety attacks. 

I feared that if I prayed to keep my dad safe in his helicopter in the desert then God would try and strengthen my faith by letting him die. 

I feared if I prayed for help with my anxiety, he would allow my mom to get into an accident, which my young brain surmised God could do to teach me to manage my racing thoughts. 

I became obsessed with it all, 

With how exactly to pray so that I could both get relief from my own mind while also keeping my family safe. 

My fear started to affect me physically by way of headaches and intense nausea when I suspected God was giving me this anxiety because I had done something to deserve it. 

So, I prayed, 

“Please forgive me God, I am a sinner.”

“Please don’t kill my dad, God, I will do anything.”

Childhood with my God did not feel like childhood. 

When my dad came home, I felt relief but there were, of course, my friend’s dads who did not come home.

My teacher had assured me God answers prayers, were those Marines who had less family praying for them more deserving of death?

Did God really need sustained worship from the masses to decide which lives were worth saving?

Could I love a God who did?

Any time I would feel the sticky, black poison otherwise known as doubt seep into my skin I fell into a deep depression that I could only ascertain was happening because I had abandoned God.

This made me stay. 

“Yes, Lord I know I am inherently bad, please forgive me.”

“Yes, Lord I know I am nothing without you, please love me.”

Leaving my small, private elementary school for a public middle school introduced me to jokes about sex, the best friends I probably had in my entire life, and a history of the world that did not include Noah’s Ark.

My life did not revolve around God, but I was still fearful and still a dirty sinner and still praying. 

I journaled my feelings compulsively which now read like the confessions of a monk wrestling with a crippling crisis of faith and not of a sixth grader just wanting to not feel so nervous by the bus stop. 

So, I prayed strategically, careful to not kill my mom or any of my new friends in the process, 

Careful to not crash my bus. 

“I am so sorry I ever doubted you, please don’t hurt me.”

In public school we had an assembly on abusive relationships and how to know you were in one and, critically, how to leave. 

A speaker spoke of her experience with a man who hurt her.

My friend asked, “How could someone stay through that?”

I said nothing but when I got home and submitted to a force I worshiped because I was inherently bad and stupid and dirty and not worth saving on my own merit alone, I knew.

Hot Showers 

In a malignant stage of adolescent girlhood, I thought my world began and ended with a boy who once called me a crazy fucking bitch in our high school parking lot. 

I was green in the way I listened and in the way I spoke, hanging onto threads of promised sunshine long into a night that, at this point, had lasted for one year, seven months, and two days. 

Holding hands on leather couches and stargazing on manicured lawns revealed the outwardly shine of American suburbia almost flawlessly. 

I was lost in it as quickly as I could have been. 

A kind boy who had been my neighbor, funny and impossibly adoring. 

Our relationship did not grow so much as it molded. 

It was both all I wanted and what was making me so thin I felt almost invisible. 

It was both a soothing hug and the vile words that came before it. 

Rage and joy, peace and turmoil. 

I was teetering between these extremes, existing in all of them almost daily, his mood the ultimate decider of whether I was the love of his life or the crazy fucking bitch. 

I hung to the gifts of niceties and grieved as soon as they were whisked away.

Food stopped tasting good when he started to suspect that our relationship had not progressed because we hadn’t had sex.

I didn’t want to have sex in the ways I believed husbands and wives did because, even at sixteen, I was more terrified of God than I was of him but he convinced me that we could be together in another way that wouldn’t count and surely wouldn’t harm my chances of salvation. 

As soon as we began, I cried and it hurt severely. 

I asked him to stop and he didn’t. 

I ran into a light blue basement bathroom as soon as it ended and whatever disgust I felt on my own body felt infinitely augmented inward.

Whatever green I had left was now black, rotted.  

My face was swollen and red when I opened the door back up, out to a yellow room, a sunny day, and a boy who told me I was making him feel like a monster. 

I don’t remember a single other detail about that exchange, or about that day, other than I took the hottest shower I could physically stand when he left and I have not stopped taking them since. 

Each day, a hot shower. Each day, over a decade later, a hot shower.

Church 

My toes twitch to the beat of my racing thoughts and I am holding a large and soft and taupe colored pillow tightly against my chest as I tell my therapist that I feel like I will never be able to have sex again. 

My husband is good and kind and gentle so why, even when I am just being held, do I feel rough and cheap carpet digging into my face and hear a voice telling me to stop crying. 

I buried all this years ago. 

Why was I able to be sexual for months without thoughts of this particular man who took a metaphorical scalpel and cut what was light and easygoing and trusting out of my chest by force, and took his literal hand to muffle my quiet sobs, by force, his favorite way of taking things, 

I buried all this years ago. 

But my god it feels like I am still a fucking ghost sometimes when I couldn’t stomach food and my body wasn’t mine and it feels almost like if I touch where I have been sitting, I will find blood, but I won’t, because it was so long ago. 

I buried all this years ago. 

My therapist hears the words spoken by my face and not my voice because I have not yet put any of this to words and she tells me that, in the three years I have been seeing her, I have never once told her any of what happened. I have never said more than, “a boy hurt me when I was in school.” 

Never rape, never assault, but during our brief intake before starting to work together I said “it wasn’t consensual.” 

Why would I need to tell her the specifics of those ancient wounds?

I buried all this years ago. 

When I started therapy there were more pressing things on my mind like jobs and stress and friends and betrayal and functioning. 

Then, sex started to become impossible and what I thought was long buried came back to scare me,

This trauma from long ago reanimated and haunting my mind and every received touch.  

My voice, muffled by a small sound machine outside of her door broadcasting the sounds of crickets, was heard only by my therapist,

But maybe that was enough, 

And I told her what happened to me the first and second and third and tenth time and somewhere in the details I realized that where you bury things matter. 

I had used a Pet Sematary, so it is no wonder the dead were following me to my bed. 

So, in order to be rid of what will not abide by rigor mortis I must talk and I must feel and I must cry and I must grieve, 

And in this maddening process I understand why “sometimes, dead is better” but I do not have the luxury of finality so I must learn to live. 

And in the months that followed my failed postmortem I found that less and less goes bump in the night.

-Jodi Hall

Jodi is a medical librarian living in Shawnee, Kansas with her husband and two-year-old son, who lights up her world. She is widely passionate about reading, writing, coffee, and Halloween. Her poem "Undiagnosed" was nominated by her university for the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project. Her poem "Mother's Day" was recently published in the book Mother's Reverie.