Emily Vance Brown

When I started going to church—yes, as an adult, and yes, of my own free will, I thought I’d lie and tell everyone I was reading in the park. 

Every Sunday, that’s me, under the monkey tree at Barton Springs,

reading in the park. 

If I hadn’t shared my location, maybe. Most likely, no one would have asked about my time at all and I could have spent my forbidden church Sundays as honest and godly as the wide-brimmed hat ladies in the front pew.

“What the hell, Emily?” my friends asked, and I thought, “Yeah, what the hell, Emily?” but what I said instead was: “Oh, that? That’s my exposure therapy.”

Sure, I guess. Maybe.

I can’t afford the outpatient treatment so I’m treating the PTSD myself. The more I speak, the more I believe. I can’t afford therapy; I’m managing it myself. It’s fine.

It’s fine. 

They wouldn’t understand: I went to see god.

No, not Him.

This god was bright and witty, and when I said something she thought was smart or funny, or really, when I said anything at all, she would beam at me like the blue ribbon winner at the stockyard show and I’d forget whatever it was I’d been planning to say next. 

She told me in another life she’d have liked to be a man named James. 

“Could you be James in this life?”

No, no, no. That kind of bravery was for other people. She was just a Christian. She was just a girl.

We sat in the same seats every time, left side, three rows from the back, far enough from the front to whisper without being heard but close enough to see the pastor’s ridiculous hats. We liked to rank them on a 10 point scale: 3 for the fedora with the pink ribbon, 7 for the newsboy cap that made him look like a reporter from the 1940s. 

And the pastor would say something about loving your neighbor or being true to yourself and she would look over at me for longer than I could look back. Sometimes, I was too scared to look at all. 

Other times, I stared into her eyes and I thought,

maybe—

and when we went for coffee after, or migas tacos across the street, or when we stayed to talk to the other churchgoers and she introduced me as her new friend, once even telling an old woman I was her new friend who had spent the night—

(platonically, get your mind out of the gutter)

I’d think,

maybe.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Or; someday.

——

Sometimes you fall in love and it’s beautiful and true and whatever else it is we’re saying about romance these days, and other times you look at someone with an ache in your chest, and they look back at you, and you both think:

I could save her if she’d let me.