4

I didn’t forget about my newfound awareness of human mortality after I returned home from my grandfather’s house; I hadn’t thought I would. I didn’t see how anyone could go back to normal life after having a moment of clarity like that one. It seemed like I should do something, like the way I approached each day should fundamentally change now that I saw what my life was in the grand scheme of things. Part of me wanted to give up on everything and sit frozen in despair, but another part of me felt like I should do my math homework instead. My mind was split between the side of me that said that nothing ultimately mattered, and another side that felt certain that the little moments of daily life did have lasting significance, even though I couldn’t explain why.

Since there were no good solutions, I employed the strategy I’d discovered in my grandfather’s pickup truck: I lost myself in fun activities that required a lot of mental energy. Eventually, my struggle settled into an awareness that there was something awful that I was trying not to think about, but I had forgotten what it was. I would be making a Debbie Gibson mix tape, and just as I was wondering whether it would be a betrayal to the concept to include a Tiffany song, I’d feel the unsettling thoughts rumbling nearby. If I hunkered down and focused obsessively about whether “I Saw Him Standing There” could hold its own next to “Foolish Beat”, the thoughts would pass by. It was a method of intentional forgetting, and it worked.

The problem was that Christians screwed everything up. I’d be sitting in social studies class, wondering if I could possibly care any less about the difference between the House and the Senate, and some kid in front of me would lean forward and reveal that his T-shirt had a Bible verse printed on the back. The dam that held back another existential crisis would quiver and begin to crack, and it would take a tremendous amount of energy to get my mind back on track. The sheer absurdity of it all—the idea that otherwise normal, reasonable families would cling to fairy tales to avoid facing reality—showed me that the truth was so terrifying that people would do just about anything to avoid it.

The blowup at camp didn’t end up being the atom bomb on my social life that I’d originally thought it would be: The memories of what happened began to fade, and my friends eventually found themselves more interested in getting a big enough group together to play Marco Polo in the backyard pool than distancing themselves from heathens. The dismantling of my friendships with Christians ended up being more of a slow process, something that happened little by little, tiny bits of warmth disappearing each time the topic of faith came up.

Usually, it didn’t bother me. I was young enough that I hadn’t formed deep bonds with very many kids, and it seemed like a waste of everyone’s time to force a relationship between people who saw the world completely differently. But sometimes it hurt, and I saw what a tragedy it was that religion could come between people who would otherwise be close. That was the case with my friend Andrea.

Andrea had been in another cabin at the same camp during Tippy’s Inquisition, and so she’d heard that I didn’t want to get saved (and probably heard that I’d spit on the ground at the name of Jesus and shouted that I hated God, which was the latest from the neighborhood rumor mill). She probably also heard that a week later a friend’s mom asked me point blank if I believed in God, and I said no. Before all of that she’d known that my family wasn’t religious, but had never asked questions. Now there was palpable tension when the topic of religion came up.

It was around that time that my parents announced that we were moving again for my dad’s job, this time to Denver. Anytime Andrea and I hung out, the question of whether we would keep in touch lingered in the air. I’d moved plenty of times before, and between the expense of long distance calls and the hassle of writing letters, I knew that leaving the state was one way to find out who your true friends were.

A few days before the moving van came, I spent the afternoon at Andrea’s house. She and I sat on her bed, chatting next to frilly pillows and her favorite stuffed rabbit. The conversation took an unfortunate turn, and Andrea started babbling about church and Jesus. The upheaval from the move had thrown me for a loop, and I’d been having a hard time keeping the dark thoughts at bay. I really, really did not want to hear anything about her religious fairy tales right then.

Normally, Andrea was more sensitive to my differing views on this topic, but this time she kept going. An elderly lady who went to her church had died, and Andrea was wondering what it must be like for her in heaven. I shifted on the bed and looked toward the door, trying to make it as obvious as possible that I wasn’t engaged. I cleared my throat. I tried to change the subject. But she kept going. Finally, I reached a breaking point.

She said that she and her parents had gone to church to pray for this woman’s family, and Andrea had asked her parents if she could stay a while longer. She said that in times like these, she liked to hang out with Jesus. Before I could stop the words from coming out of my mouth, I sneered, “Oh, yeah, Jesus likes to ‘hang out’ all right.” And I held my hands up and cocked my head to the side, in a mockery of the Crucifixion.

It felt good, for a second. It was a release to cause her pain the way she’d caused me pain, like finally hitting someone who’s been provoking you. But as soon as I saw the stricken look on her face, I felt sick. My words echoed in my head, and I couldn’t believe such a hateful tone had come from my mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . I don’t know why I said that,” I mumbled. Of course, it was too late. The question of whether or not we’d keep in touch after I moved had been answered.

* * *

We lived in Denver for two years, then returned to Texas just in time for my freshman year in high school. We rented a house near where my grandparents lived, just a few miles away from The Creek. Even though the town was semi-rural and predominantly Christian, I managed to find a small group of friends who were all atheist or agnostic. I got straight A’s and filled my life with drama that was extreme even by teenage girl standards, which mostly kept my mind off whatever it was I was trying so hard to forget.

When it came time for college, there was never any question of where I would go. All my Texan relatives on my dad’s side of the family considered Texas A&M to be the finest university in the world, and there was an assumption that it would be any intelligent person’s first choice for higher education. I could have gone to Oxford and my dad’s aunts would have whispered with pity, “So she couldn’t get in to A&M?” My dad had been a student there before he entered the military, and he told me all about the unique vibe of the campus, which had rigorous academics by day, rowdy hijinks by night, and a whole host of wonderfully bizarre school traditions.

Unfortunately for me, things had changed a lot since Dad was there. Texas A&M still had the wonderfully bizarre traditions, but in recent decades it had become a deeply Christian university. The first semester I was there, a group of professors placed a full-page ad in the student newspaper identifying themselves as believers, inviting students to talk to them about their relationships with Christ. Students would stand and preach from the Bible in front of the Academic Building, entreating passersby to get saved (which always struck me as pointless since, as far as I could tell, I was the only person on campus who wasn’t already a Christian). People would chat after Friday classes about which church service they would be attending on Sunday.

It was like elementary school all over again. I had a few friends, and there were plenty of things I liked about where I lived, but I walked around with the constant stress of not fitting in. In anthropology class a guy would raise his hand and suggest that the Amazonian tribe we were studying wouldn’t have so many problems if they would embrace the Lord Jesus Christ; in poli-sci a girl would respond to the professor’s question with an impromptu speech about how this nation needed to get back to its Christian roots; and at the end of the day, I’d feel drained by all the imaginary arguments I’d had where I totally demolished these people’s ridiculous points in my head.

Also like elementary school, being surrounded by vocal Christians made it hard to forget the chilling fact of human mortality. The kids at A&M were smart. The school’s engineering and sciences programs were some of the best in the country. To be at the library and see students talking about Jesus like he was sitting next to them, then notice their advanced physics and biomedical engineering books stacked on the table, was to be reminded that the truth about life was bad enough that it could drive even intelligent people to a state of delusional insanity. Every week I was there, I got a little closer to an existential crisis.

By the spring of my sophomore year, I couldn’t take it anymore. I applied to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin and withdrew from A&M even before I found out whether I’d been accepted at UT.

I didn’t know what I’d do if I got a rejection letter, but staying at A&M was no longer an option.

* * *

I did get into UT, which was a huge relief since I’d already rented an apartment near campus. My mom called one afternoon, only two months before classes were set to begin, and read the acceptance letter that had arrived at our home address. After I hung up the phone, I looked out my window onto Duval Street and watched an orange-and-white campus bus ease to a stop at the corner. Associating myself with those colors felt wrong. I never imagined that I’d graduate from college anywhere other than Texas A&M, and I certainly couldn’t have conceived that I would have ended up at its big rival school.

When people asked, I said that I transferred to UT because it had an advertising program that offered a technical track that focused on internet media. There was some truth to that. But I knew the real reason, and it made me feel like an idiot. What was wrong with me that I had to leave a place that I loved in many ways because I couldn’t be around religious people? Why was I always so close to an existential crisis that I couldn’t function like a normal person? Nobody struggled with that kind of thing. The other atheists I knew didn’t seem to have any problem with the fleetingness of human life. I’d never met anyone else who seemed troubled by the insanity of religious fervor, or who had their thoughts constantly drifting in the bleakest directions.

By the time I was done with college, I was determined to pull myself together. I graduated from UT in December, then spent the holidays with my parents. I returned to Austin in time to celebrate the last day of the twentieth century with friends and woke up on January 1, 2000, ready to begin my new life. It felt like I was embarking on a quest that was nothing short of a search for the meaning of life.