HOLY #097

HOLY is my lost adolescence. An evangelical coming of age that was never simple enough to hate.

When I was thirteen my dad bought a Contax T2. Point and shoot, flash on the front, the date burned into the corner. He told me I could have it one day. He died before I turned thirty, which is how the promise was kept. It is the only thing I still own from my childhood.

The years were chaos rather than cruelty, and my parents loved me. There were more baptisms by fire at home than there ever were at church. The camera was in the house for all of it.

My mom's photo albums were the most prized things she owned. They were lost in hasty moves and in storage units that nobody kept paying for, and by the time I was ready to go back for them, and I mean ready in the way you have to be ready for something like that, there was nothing left to restore. So I described them from memory to a machine that wasn't there. This is what came back.

Some of these things happened. Some are dreams, and the rest were just true of those years and never on anybody's film, because nobody photographs the part you remember. The camera is the only original.

The nineties. Motel pools, basements, parking lots, altar calls, sun on wet skin, hard flash on everything. The church taught me to love a man who ate with the lowest people in his society, then handed me a list of who to hate, and the list was the people it had put at the bottom of ours.

At sixteen I was taught that love and desire were evil. They never were. HOLY is a cry against that twisting. The only way I know to raise it is to name the hate that was standing in love's place.