saint barbara i'm calling your name

don't let me explode

The Holy Gospel According to St. Mark:

The radio-evangelist couldn’t keep her awake anymore. For a while listening to him spout on and on about fire and brimstone, about being ready, about heaven and earth passing away and all that, had entertained her. 

Now his voice was just a drone, and it was more likely to put her to sleep than to keep her awake. 

So she changed the radio-station again. Nothing was on, though, except jazz and classical music. That wouldn’t do. She rolled down the window. The wind blew in, and the cold air shocked her awake. For at least a little longer.

“Stay awake,” she said to herself — for probably the millionth time. She blinked, but then had to fight to pull her eyelids up after letting them shut.

‘This is crazy,’ she thought. It didn’t take long for her to find an exit with signs for gas-stations and hotels. She took the exit, pulled into a hotel parking lot and checked her purse. She didn’t have much money, hardly enough to get down to California. 

She sighed, ‘would this work, this time,’ she wondered to no one other than herself. 

She didn’t need to stay in a hotel anyway, not really. All she needed was to let herself sleep long enough to feel awake again. After that she would finish her trek. 

California, where it was always warm and sunny. Things would work out there, finally. They had to. Some of her friends from high school had moved out there. She figured she’d find them and then get settled.

That’s what had been so hard about Seattle. She didn’t know anyone. Plus it was always gray and cold. Well, those things and the rent. She hadn’t been able afford to live there, not with just her part time job at one of the ubiquitous coffee shops anyway. 

She sighed again, and her eyelids felt heavy.

She let herself fall asleep. Hoping no one from the hotel would come out and pound on her window, abruptly waking her up and making her leave.

Not even her apprehension was enough to keep her awake for long, though. She fell asleep. 

Not that it was a deep sleep. She could tell she was sleeping in her car, cold and cramped.

But she dreamt. As she felt the dream fall upon her, she grew anxious. It felt like remembering, but she couldn’t control the memory. It just came upon her, settled there. 

There she was, that day she sat at the beach all afternoon into the evening, wondering what she’d do. It had been the day she realized she couldn’t afford to stay in Seattle. She had gone to the beach, the one of the northeastern edge of Seattle, because she had been trying to figure out what to do next.

Not that she liked Seattle anyway. She didn’t know anyone there; and no one knew her, either…

She had gone to the beach that afternoon. It wasn’t sunny and warm, the way you imagine beaches growing up in Minnesota. It was gray and rainy. Typical. To take her mind off all her worries she had tried to make out the horizon from the Puget Sound. She tried to use the barges as her guides, but couldn’t make out the difference.

Before she knew it, the afternoon had turned into evening. Although she was cold, she didn’t want to go back to her tiny, lonely apartment. So she just sat there. Then the stars came out.

Then her dream twisted and turned on itself. She could feel the memory mutating into something else. She felt it in her bones. She wasn’t dreaming a memory anymore. Maybe her dream had never been a memory in the first place; maybe it had been a strange nightmare all along. 

If she had been able to get herself to wake up, she would have. But the sleep clung to her. The dream hung there. Her sleeping body didn’t move, and neither did her body in the dream. In the dream she just sat there, although she wanted to run.

Suddenly, the thing she knew was going to happen, did.

A star moved. It wasn’t a shooting star. She would almost say the star fell, but that wasn’t exactly right. 

No, it was more like the sky that held the star itself fell loose. Then another star fell, and another, and another. Suddenly whole swatches fell right out of the sky. She realized with horror that she had been right.

The sky itself was breaking apart, falling from the dome of the heavens. It was like the sky that protected the earth from the gods themselves was coming apart. Then she looked down and the sand was falling beneath her — kind of like sand down an hourglass. Only that wasn’t right. No, it was more like the earth that which held that sand there was falling away. Falling into nothingness.

If she could have ran, she would have. But she couldn’t, the dream and its heavy, restless sleep wrapped around her completely. In fact, the dream had become catastrophic, she forgot she was dreaming.

There was nothing left of the sky anymore. Above her was pure nothingness. Total nothingness. She had always thought disasters, like in those end of the world movies, was the most terrifying, but this was worse. Just nothing, only black and silence. Below her, more of the same. In fact, the bench she had been sitting on was gone.

Although she hadn’t remembered standing up, she suddenly realized she was.

Then, with a jolt she awoke. She was breathing heavy, her heart was beating hard, and she was disoriented.

She looked around, but nothing was familiar. What was she doing in a seat? She was cold. Was the sun rising or setting. Wait! What was she doing outside. No she was in her car. She jerked her head left and then right, mostly to prove to herself that she could, that the dream was over.

Then, gently it came back to her. She was driving down to California. Seattle hadn’t worked out. 

She had couldn’t handle living in that small Minnesota town she grew up in, with all its obligations; so she left. She had gone to Seattle, because she liked how everyone talked about all the rain they had. 

She thought it’d be poetic. But it wasn’t. It was just chilly. All the time. 

Then, she couldn’t get a job, not a full-time one, anyway. So even that tiny apartment on the edge of downtown, the one she had to be careful walking from her bus-stop into; even that apartment was out of her price range. 

She wondered how the creeps who lived there afforded to. It only took a moment for her to realize she didn’t want to think about that. So one day, after sitting by the beach well into the night, she decided to leave. She decided she’d go to California, where it was sunny and warm. 

She was on her way to California; where things would work.

Only that didn’t feel right anymore. She wondered if it was just the nightmare making her feel uneasy about her plan. She knew going to California has never felt particularly right to begin with. 

It was more like a last-ditch effort. It wasn’t even that she wanted to go there, it was just that Seattle hadn’t worked out; and she could stand the idea of California more than going back home.

Only now, even what motivation she had been able to conjure for California, seemed to have wilted in her dream. 

She felt a tear burn its way up her eye, but she didn’t want to cry. So she blinked hard. Some salt water squeezed out the corner of her eye, but that was all. It felt like she had known all along that California wouldn’t work out. Maybe she had known all along…

Then, just like that, it switched on.

She wondered if feeling like she didn’t belong here, meant that she really did belong somewhere.

She fished her keys out of her purse. Put them in the ignition and turned the key.

Her car came to life. She shifted into reverse and pulled out of the hotel parking lot. She got back on the interstate, but she knew she wouldn’t be driving South for long. 

First chance she got, she would go East. Toward home.

Amen