Tessie D

I’ve gone to church the past couple weeks that I’ve been here. Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings with my roommates. I don’t have anything else to do so I go and sit quietly in the pew. 

The sermon last week was on the fall of man. Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. I pretend to listen to the preacher, but I am mostly just sitting in the silence of the sermon. I’m not listening. I think about the weekend before. Before. Who I was. The girl that I used to be. How much I missed her. The girl who didn’t know the ugliness, the pettiness of people. 

I can see the preacher’s lips moving, I hear the words. But, mostly I sit in with my eyes closed and focus on my breathing.

Imagine that I’m flying, or floating. It’s all black and stillness. My arms grow heavy and I feel rooted to my seat. I sing the songs and feel my spirits lift higher. but mostly I just think about Sorrow. I don’t let myself think about her during the week except for those two hours. I imagine what she’d look like now, what her first day of school would have been like. I remember her deep blue eyes looking up at me when we’d lie in bed, nursing in the mornings and the softness of her hair slipping in between my fingers when I’d wash the shampoo out of her hair.

I pray for her soul and her forgiveness. That I’d prayed for a miscarriage in those early months when the darkness pulled me under at night. That I’d thought about giving her up for adoption. I was going to do it, too, until Momma told me that I couldn’t. That she wouldn’t allow it.

I know that my Baby, my sorrow, would be alive if I had given her up. I imagine her living with a nice couple in a big brick house far away from here where she’d have been loved and taken care of. Where she’d still be alive and happy. Laying on a blanket in the backyard, a family dog sleeping nearby. Chubby arms reaching up to a different woman, never knowing poverty or sickness. Pangs of regret stab at me and I feel tears welling up, sometimes I let them fall and the preacher interprets this devotion.

Maybe it is — devotion to my daughter and her existence. 

“O ye Sun and Moon… O ye Stars… ye Green Things upon the Earth… ye Fowls of the Air… Beasts and Cattle… Children of Men… bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.”