HOLY

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, and they were lost in hasty moves and in storage units that nobody kept paying for. When I was finally ready to restore the photographs and the memories from that time, there was nothing left to restore. So I described them from memory. This is what came back. 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: the ones 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, and the only way I know to raise it is to name the hate that was standing in love's place.