i left god in elementary school

Indulging in media has been a pastime I feel I have sorely missed out on for these past few months. My body feeds on the food I receive from snippets of poetry and the novellas I read. My head fills with the repeated rhythms of the piece of music that moved me to tears the same morning. The art I don’t make sits all jumbled up inside me, a lopsided nearly toppled over mess I desperately try to keep cobbled together with stitches of penciled sticky notes and a thick gauze of endless hours of studying the same concepts over and over wondering if I have any interest in them at all or if I’m merely inspired by the fictive caricature of my identity I heave so loftily onto his lonely pedestal.
Nonetheless, indulging in the media and the art created by others has been helping ease some of my discontentment. I still feel the tender loss of my philosophies, my heart and body yearn to fall back into my old practices, but listening to other artists be impassioned by art is reminding me why I have stuck with it for so long. Or rather, why it has stuck to me. It’s become the ground beneath my feet and the wavy lines I see on my ceiling, high on mushrooms. It’s the feeling of his warm breath on my neck and the itchy fur of my cat.

When I was young, maybe 5 or 6, I would hide in my closet to talk to god. The blanket of blackness was a cover from the responsibility waiting upstairs, my parents strained voices resounding quietly above me, muffled past the point of comprehension, though I usually found myself imagining what sort of discussions they were having up there that I wasn’t allowed to hear. At that age I was grappling with the concept of a Christian God. My family was Christian and they raised me as such, prayers in the evening and before meals, church on Sundays. If God made everything, what made God? I’m sure it’s a question so many children before me and after me will ask. There isn’t an answer. Not one that will be tangible at least in my lifetime, so I believe now. When I was 5 or 6, I used to ask God all sorts of questions in the corner of my closet; next to the sump pump that made me jump every time in ran. God never said anything back. Then I would imagine a world before God. But I couldn’t, not really. I’d need only close my eyes to see the wondrous colors emerge, translucent patterns floating across the backs of my eyelids.
A big empty white expanse: B.G. (Before God). I figured though, that the color white would not exist without God, so I must get rid of that too. But even in a black empty void, there is still a void and there is still that endless blackness. I could not conjure up the idea of “nothing” in my mind.
Today I sit at my desk writing these things down to a future me who may not remember this moment until he rereads it. For as long as I can remember I have always been fascinated by being, by existence, by the darkness and the light opposite it, by love and the human condition, by god. god in all of the divine forms god can take. the dried flower petals coloring your tea and the yellow pool of light gathering on my bedroom floor from the soft sun setting over the house I grew up in.
And art, divine and lovely. Books, music language, bodies, the eyes staring back at me from across the bed, the face looking down upon me when I tilt up my head. To me the world does not create rhyme or reason without art, it’s what makes me human, it’s what shapes my understanding of the world and the filter through which I digest my experiences.