There’s a storm coming.

I am insanely jealous of Anne Lamott. Most days I want to put on an Anne Lamott or David Bazan suit, like some kind of fuck - all serial killer and dance around in their doubt, make their art, be their age. I want to exchange my crashing plane for Anne’s, which is still crashing but with a hell of a lot more grace and poetry than my hooptie cargo hanger.

I want to eat her maturity and truly digest, puke up and digest again the retarding notion that I cannot understand everything. I want to shake the feeling that I am completely missing what Christianity has to offer.

Lani just ran by my window waving a messy 2 X 4 frantically screaming, “come out side right now, you’re missing it!” Then she ran off. I left my computer and found her shouting at a New England sunset; the sort of gray and pink that would cause Philip Guston to roll over in his grave and me to shove my hands in my pockets. “You can‘t see that on your computer!” I wanted to beat her with the 2 X 4, but I looked up at the sky and wished, maybe even prayed, that there was a god up there in those salmon clouds.

“There’s a storm coming!” Lani yelled and disappeared behind the side of the building. Looking into the clouds became unbearable the way Kris’s face occasionally does because it’s too beautiful, too kind, too similar to the god I thought I understood. I was also standing outside in just a t-shirt and jeans in the middle of a spring windstorm and realized that I was freezing. I sulked to the front door with all kinds of Christian ghosts on my back chuckling to themselves prodigal hymns that were exquisitely harmonized but ultimately bullshit.

I reached for the front door and it was locked. In a rush to catch Lani I had locked myself out of the building. I sprinted around to the part of the building Lani had disappeared behind and found her giggling by another entrance. Grad school is driving us all insane. John and Frank were watching the sunset smoking cigarettes and talking about boy things, Lani was calling nature out on its gorgeousness and I was all wrapped up in a goblin god-construct.

Later Lani and I, depressed and neurotic, went hunting for cheese. We exchanged insecurities over sugar, beer and mozzarella. Like and angel, Lani let me eat all the toppings off of some of her pizza and I hoped that friendship, love, pizza, good books and really hearing people would eventually fill the Jesus shaped hole in my heart that someone once told me I had.