a book with many roots.

when i was nine, i consciously discovered religion.

it isn't as if christianity hadn't always been a presence in my life -- it was merely unseen, a ghost carrying me from city to city and home again. my mother read from a big yellow devotional sometimes, and i remember her, haloed by oozing chartreuse light, desperately imparting the wisdom of the lord to my sister and me. at least, she seemed desperate, as if she only had so much time to make a deep enough impression that would remain with us, like a tattoo or a scar. i remember realizing that my mother wasn't simply sharing stories with us -- that many people believed the stories to be true, that they found some greater truth in whispering fervent prayers at the alter or at the dining room table.

by this point in my young life, my transience had became a palpable part of my existence. i began to meet people who weren't growing up the way i was, other kids who lived in the same home for all of their nine or ten years, had the same friends since the play-dates their parents held in need of a toddler reprieve, play-dates they couldn't even remember themselves.

and i had begun to want that feeling of permanence.

i don't remember who suggested my baptism. for all i know it was my mother's mother, a woman who carried us off to church each sunday that we visited her. it was a ritual, one that i enjoyed but didn't understand. whoever it was, it sparked an idea in me -- that maybe, if i loved god enough, he would be something i could carry with me no matter where i went. no matter what happened, he would give me the roots i was craving. i convinced myself that no matter how often i moved, how many friends i left behind with no forwarding address(es), i could have god.

i began to read the bible. i was given one, and then another after i was baptized. i read and read and participated in bible studies and read some more, picking the pieces apart, looking for bones and branches, anything to give me certainty.

a few years passed, and my fervor passed with them. the more i understood about the bible, the less i understood its followers. the more i read, the more questions i asked that were left unanswered, shut down. my mother listened, offered advice. she kindly let me doubt in the ways i think you have to doubt, at least at the beginning. but some of my preachers and teachers couldn't silence me quickly enough. how dare you question god? how dare you wonder about the miracle of christ's birth? it's in the bible, and so it is.

i felt my roots in faith wither, starved for answers. i went through waves of devotion and rebellion, especially after the last move, the one that ended the life i had once known. but even still, after that, i went back to the church, back for more answers and hoping, begging for stronger roots.

maybe i am broken for religion, broken for faith, because after that final back experience, i've never consistently returned.

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author's note: i do not write this to condemn, or to claim neglect, or to point to someone's failing. i thought that faith in something would give me permanence, but it didn't. i came to that faith selfishly, and now realize how much of faith is giving with no expectation of receipt. religion didn't work for me, or maybe i didn't work for it, but either way, my quest for spiritual foundation was cracked and faltering and left me floating, halfway between faith and cynicism. i'm floating still, though now with far less fear of falling.

georgia to texas: the summer of 2003

the move from warner robins, ga to helotes, tx was the worst of them all.

i finished writing my second novel that summer, my mother's fujitsu plugged into "the purple box" so that i could write as we drove west. i wrapped headphones around my ears, and listened to the angriest music my mother would allow, trying to tap in and tune out as i killed my heroine's love interest on a winding back road, introduced ghosts and pirates and unicorns that fulfilled prophecies. it was god awful, but i still have the floppy disks brimming with multiple, minutely different drafts.

that summer, i turned fourteen. i spent most of the day strung out on a mattress in my grandmother's living room, my makeshift bedroom until we had walls farther south. i stuffed myself with ritz crackers and dr. pepper. a laptop kept me company, my single connection backwards, my virtual highway east. it was a nice computer, considering the time, and my grandfather was kind enough to let me borrow it for weeks on end, even though he was writing another book and probably needed the mobility more than i needed to rebel against my parents' choices.

i had my first brush with danger that august -- a stranger in a chat room masquerading as an acquaintance, a man desperate to know my full name, my address, my phone number, my parents' names, a/s/l. i gave him nothing but a nickname, parading through cyberspace with a tolkien-inspired screen-name, but he got closer and closer to my trust, inching ever nearer in the way that predators (even unintentional ones) always do. i think he thought he could save me from the horrors of my mind, but no one could, not even me.

theatre camp was supposed to be the final crossing into my new life. two weeks in the mountains of montana, learning a new show with 120 other hand-selected students from across the country. we were talented, they said, full of potential. all i felt was full of blood, toxic red that leaked from me and stained my skin. i felt that i carried my pain to the fire-scorched forests, so far removed from the entanglements of leaving and yet so immersed in them that i thought they would never leave me.

that move was a kind of trauma that i previously imagined myself immune to. was it my age? was it that my father's mother had died in georgia, and i felt wrong being away from the remains of her? was it the house in kathleen, blue and perfect and the one i chose for us before my parents had even brushed the curb with our weathered tires? was it all that had happened in that bedroom, or the way my demons finally emerged, fully-fleshed and taunting, in the bathroom mirror i shared with a sister who couldn't see them?

was it all in the timing, or did any of that matter at all?