Page 18 of Longing for Liberty

ELEVEN

STATE NEWS: VP WALINGER GIVES HOPE-FILLED SPEECH: “TO BE ILL IS TO BE CLOSER TO HEAVEN.”

Sundays were church days. A full eight hours.

I grew up in the church, and I still clung to a thread of that faith.

Maybe it was crazy at this point, but for me, faith had always been synonymous with hope, ideas I’d once held as sacred and beautiful.

Now, both faith and hope felt different.

Tinged. Marred. My beliefs, however, were of a loving entity who gave free will, not the fire and brimstone spoken of every Sunday.

Church now was a mandatory place and time. The church was not the people.

Still, I found I was able to drown out the shouted teachings reminding us of our time of darkness before Roan and enjoy the two aspects I’d come to love: singing the hymns and my two hours of nursery duty.

Singing hymns a-cappella was interesting.

Instruments were not allowed. Music wasn’t allowed, in general.

So there was something immeasurably pleasing about raising our voices together, the men and women harmonizing.

There was always someone singing horribly off-key, and one woman who warbled in a loud operatic voice.

Sometimes Jeremy would squeeze my hand when she belted out a high note, and I didn’t dare look at him for fear of laughing.

And then there were the babies. So many of them. I felt lucky to have landed this duty. Diapers and spit-up didn’t bother me. Nor did their constant runny noses, though I kept my hands washed when no one was looking. I soaked in their sounds and sweetness like it was rocket fuel for my soul.

God, I missed my children.

Each day, I felt like I lost more memories, and if I let myself ponder it for more than a split second, I would be pulled under. I would drown in melancholy and then float up, only to burn in rage the moment my body hit sunlight.

No, no, no, I couldn’t think of what I’d lost. What we’d all lost.

I was already glum when it was time for the women’s prayer group.

Every week we prayed for illnesses. Usually I had my guard up, my internal wall of numbness, but today I was raw.

A woman spoke of two families with six-year-old daughters who were bedridden with fevers and horrible coughs.

I knew the girls and their mothers—well, as much as you could know someone in these times.

But I’d held the girls as toddlers and helped them learn their colors with blocks.

Now they were coughing up blood, hardly able to breathe, and hallucinating with high fevers.

Their poor little bodies. As we bowed our heads, my body was wracked with a sob that came up from my soul.

Every week.

Every fucking week we prayed for these children and their rashes and red bumps and fevers and wracking coughs. Sometimes they survived. Sometimes their little bodies succumbed to the sicknesses. But always they suffered.

Many of us cried now, on our knees in an old elementary school classroom with its dusty, worn carpet. But I’d never cried like this in front of these women, my whole body arching into the sadness as I allowed it to hit me.

How many centuries had mothers cried like this?

Begging for divine interventions. Miracles.

And how many times were we told and shown that those prayers had already been answered?

That we were the answer. That we’d each been infused with the breath of life, the direct power to be used for good?

That we had been made to help one another?

I wanted to scream, Look at what humanity created with the blessings of our minds and wills and work ethics!

Look at the vaccines! The antibiotics! Every single medical innovation!

But no. We wanted only divine miracles that couldn’t be explained any other way except God’s direct intervention, not through a human.

Because man was tainted. And that was true.

Even the good things we made had downsides.

Everything good would be somehow abused, because human nature was imperfect. And so we threw every good thing away.

I straightened on my knees, getting a hold of myself, wiping my face with my hands.

The older woman beside me rubbed my back, and I gave her a small smile of gratitude and saw that she’d been crying as well.

A quick scan around the group showed that most of the women had been crying.

How many of them shared my questions? My bitterness?

And how many embraced our current circumstances as the true way?