ೃ⁀➷ In the year 1994,
Maya Bennet travels to New York to attend a famous music festival, Woodstock. After stumbling into the wrong tent when searching for her lost boyfriend, she has an odd interaction with a handsome mysterious stranger. A year l...
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God's a hard concept to wrap my head around. If he were real, why do things play out the way they do? If everything happens for a reason, why do we have to lose the people we care about to grow into better people? That's what they all say. We call everything a lesson, a learning experience, something that shapes us into who we are now. But why can't we just close the book and be who we are without grieving, just so we can heal into what people consider a better version of ourselves?
I never liked church very much. Watching people stand in a line and shuffle their way up through an aisle just to eat a round piece of bread that tasted like cardboard never made much sense to me. It was even more confusing when they considered it the body of Christ. The wine, which they call blood, tastes absolutely horrible. And when you're a child it terrifies you because you don't understand the metaphor. You don't know why, and nobody cares to explain it to you.
Other than being scarred from the loud man who stood at the altar and preached about the rules I needed to follow to get into heaven, I didn't like church for a few other reasons. For one, I hated waking up early on Sundays. My mom always forced me into a dress before I could open my eyes, and whenever I tried putting on my sneakers, she was shoving my feet into a pair of shiny white shoes I outgrew.
But Dean always slipped me a five-dollar bill when he felt bad. That's the only way I made it out the door, and it worked every single time.
It wasn't just me who was miserable though, my parents didn't like going to church either. Dean hated it, a lot more than my mom. He wore sunglasses every time we went and if he was asked to take them off, he had to keep his head low. He wasn't fooling anybody though, you could smell the alcohol on his breath from the night before. I still think he was drunk most mornings, using my body to lean on to avoid falling over whenever he had to stand to sing a song.
The only reason we attended was for my grandparents; my mom's parents. They were already disappointed in their weed-smoking, band dating, free-spirited, democratic hippie daughter they raised. They said the least she could do was attend church with her family to make up for her past actions. They were quite the opposite of us, but on Sunday mornings all three of us looked just like every other faithful polished family in town.
My mom believed in something. I'm not sure she'd necessarily call it a God, but she believed in some kind of higher power. She always told me when I was a little girl; if anything happens, whatever you do, if given the option, go to the light and do not reincarnate. I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. But I always nodded my head and promised because I could see in her wide and passionate eyes how determined she was that I follow her instruction.
