The Earth is Old Under Where it is Paved

I wonder how many local art galleries I’ll have to visit to make up for never going to
Florence or anywhere in Italy, really—never going to the Pantheon or the Great Wall of China or to a Broadway play. How many high school theater productions of The Sound of Music should I attend? How many pop-up shops? How many farmer’s markets? How many online forums? How many until it’s real, until I’ve accumulated enough beauty in and around me that I can go to sleep without that pretentious ache? As of yet, I am nothing, and my body grows on the grounds where nothing great was ever built.

The earth is old under where it is paved. I try to remember that on the bus to school. The
earth is old and history is spread evenly across it, like butter on toast.

I eat toast in the morning when I run out of milk for cereal. This happens weekly, but I
don’t go shopping until the bread is gone. Even then, I’ll starve for a day or two and take extra
food from work meetings and secretly revel in the shrinking feeling until I’m empty enough that it interferes with school, and I cave. Grocery stores are latent threats, full of things I don’t want and people I know but don’t know well. And I hate the banality of shopping: the fluorescents and the parking lot and the brown plastic bags hanging in a bunch from my fists. I twist them back and forth until my fingertips go red and the bags are tangled, like a swing carousel from my childhood.

I go to amusement parks, instead of Florence, with my family over the summer. Well, I
say parks... but usually it’s just one. And it’s a fine and good experience. I try to convince
myself that even old metal and sticky-fingered children contain some cultured history. Oh, the
slobbery, salty, sweaty stories those rides could tell, I muse. Oh, the variety of hands and elbows that have bruised on those red-chipped guard rails. I joke about the Freudian catharsis of screaming upside down, when the hair is finally off my neck and hanging above my ears. I
decide to cut it. Above my jaw, this time.

I go to the hairdressers and show them a picture of a professor from the 1950s for
reference. Leave out the receding hairline please. And they snip and I think about metamorphosis and scold myself for still having not yet read Kafka. But I like the short hair anyway and try to decide which part of my maturity it symbolizes. Self-definition, perhaps. If you squint, my gender is no longer completely apparent. I wear large clothes to the grocery store. I buy a book about minimalism in the checkout line because cleanliness is next to Godliness. And I’d like to be close to God.

I go to church. I try to enjoy it. Some people say nice things about my haircut. Others
don’t mention it. Suddenly, I feel silly for wearing a dress, but I know I’d feel worse in a suit.
None of me matches anymore. I sit in a pew and muse that my fingernails are forming ridges like my mother’s have. I Google it as they pass the Sacrament. It’s a common sign of aging. I feel that I must be further from God than any person in that room has ever been. The Spirit moves other people to cry at the pulpit; the Spirit moves me to sit in a bathroom stall during the passing period. This happens most Sundays.

I go to school on Monday with relief. Competition breeds momentum breeds focus. I read
a lot, comprehend a little. My friends like the haircut. I see an acquaintance from my hometown high school, one I know but not well. My face tightens. I brace myself. Their eyes flit past me. I’m now invisible to the people who don’t know me well, and this is the greatest relief I’ve felt since the initial shearing. Suddenly the campus is beautiful now that my head no longer hangs. I recognize the impressions of hands in concrete, and who’s to say those hands are not great? I revel in the library, on the sidewalk, at the bus stop. I feel myself match. Finally, a fresh start. Maybe I’ll go on a study abroad. Maybe I’ll go to the store. Maybe I’ll spend an hour in the shower in reverence like it’s a church, like it’s a grand cathedral in Florence, like it’s beautiful to finally be clean.

God, forgive me for being so ungrateful for this life in this place. For being a snob. God
forgive me for the disingenuous parts of myself that sprout like hydra heads. And forgive me for taking this body you made and calling it nothing.

The earth is old under where it is paved. I try to remember that on the bus to school. The
earth is old and history is spread evenly across it. I read the books and talk to the people and hear the stories that are evidence of this. I whisper prayers in grocery stores and salon chairs and bathroom stalls. I find God’s answer at the local art galleries.