I grew up an altar girl.

Carried candles taller than me,
learned to tie the cincture
before I could tie my own shoes.

Alb too long; too white.
White is for brides,
not for children.
But I didn’t know.

Just knew how to carry candles,
how to tie the cincture,
and how to kneel in front of someone you couldn’t see,
but who saw everything.
And who knew everything.
Who could do everything.
Fix everything.

You just had to beg hard enough.

I got older. And really good at begging.

On my 9th birthday, my grandfather died.
My grandmother moved out.
Friends, which I barely knew how to make, left town forever.
And God kept pushing buttons—
dead pets, losing keys, losing more friends,
losing hope, losing joy.

At barely 12,
a demon made my bedroom his kingdom.
Mental health, sleep paralysis, insomnia—
that would have names much later in life
and at 14, tired of God, I figured:

If God was gonna pick a fight,
I might as well fight back.
So, that summer, I fucked a priest.

That same summer, my parents divorced.
We lost the house.
My cat got killed by a car.
Another cat starved in a locked shed.

I was still serving as altar girl,
but I wasn’t talking to God anymore.
And God was quiet, too.

Once a month, before mass,
before putting on the robe,
you sat down with the priest and confessed.
I told him that I think God hates me.
He laughed.

He works in mysterious ways, he said.
So do I, I replied.

The demon
who had made my bedroom his kingdom
had his soft moments.
I figured,
if someone knew how to fight god,
it was a demon.
And I already had one available.
No need to summon another one.

He dropped one of his eyes after I asked.
Probably because I shouldn’t have been able to speak—
paralysis an all.
Or maybe it was the question itself.
He dropped another one from laughter.

The next mass, I refused to kneel.
I didn’t sing anymore.
I altered the prayers in my head.
Deliver me not from evil—
let me learn its name first.

I didn’t light his candles anymore.
Didn’t clean the altar.
I took the communion with a full mouth of doubt,
bit it hard, wanting it to break as loud as possible.
So God would hear.

I scribbled my own psalms.
Blessed is the demon by my bed,
for you couldn’t bother once
to come down and listen.

In hindsight, not my brightest moment.

The next day,
I was allergic to the Holy Water.
To this day, I still am.

I’m not an altar girl anymore.

I figured if God wasn’t going to do his job,
someone should.
Might as well be me.

Not holy. Just functional.
Nothing big, no promises I can’t keep.

But I make sure that everyone gets
a watermelon slice with even numbered seeds—
for good luck.

I eat the odd-numbered slices.
I’ve made my peace with being spiritually radioactive.

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