Communion

Posting in the Process of Writing.

Communion, as a child, meant watered grape juice on Sundays, over-crisped saltines and bowing heads in harmony, falsely.  This was religion.  This was sacrament.  But, how many more times did I participate in communion than outside the confines of the first two clear concise definitions?  Communion, by the time you reach the third definition in a handy mobile Merriam-Webster's, is illustrated as an intimate fellowship or rapport.  Communication is considered the key of relationships for a reason.  Between eight and sixteen years old, the real communion - the only time I was connected to another with similar mind and meditation - was sitting with my sister in the afternoon and pretending, imagining, with Barbie dolls and milk crates sat sideways to make apartments and professional offices.  My religion was make-believe.  The ritual with my sister allowed me inspiration for writing when alone.  Prayer, if you will.  Meditation, perhaps.  Eventually, we grew too old to play together.  My sister started a family and I prepared to go on to college.  The crates were tipped to hold the little lives we created, and lost in endless storage shifts or to nieces with an insistence on head removal.  Had the death of this faith been my choice, my sister and I would have smelled the melt of plastic and doll hair.  Ashes would have been all that remained on the earth between us, and the gods would receive the rising smoke that was our childhood.  I suppose it's almost beautiful that we lost our childhoods instead of choosing to destroy them with our own hands.


Surrounded by artists and creatives for the year I had fled from small town Ohio to downtown city Pittsburgh, I found deeper connection with those of various similarity to myself.  Linked by the agreement that none of us wanted to be linked.  Bonded by our mutual desires to remain apart.  The lonely and depressed were bracketed until they grasped each other, until we loved each other on the foundation of understanding.  We meditated by touch, massaging out the strain of standing, bending, posing, before easels and draft-desks.  We communed.  We ate together, creating concoctions that made the list of ingredients sound like a dare. We consumed.  Our smiles, passed along busy streets,  in the chitchat of class breaks, or upon receival of a well-earned "C" or lower, was the religious experience of eighteen, nineteen, or other.  Eventually, it was time to leave the cocoon, for somewhere along the line, I lost my faith, and no amount of conviction around me could rise the feeling within myself.  

By twenty-one, we alternated between coffee dates and a drink at some local preferred bar.  Solemn and stationary, or possessed and celebratory.  
"I'm getting too old for the bar scene."  
"I work all week, how does next week look for you?"