I remember very vividly playing a video game when I was about 10 and when I couldn't beat it, I went into my room and buried my face into my pillow, letting out the hardest scream I could before ripping apart limb from limb a stuffed teddy bear, which was actually more of a stuffed bunny given to me by an ugly girl at school named Sophia, who in spite of my repeated attempts to convey my revulsion towards her, wanted very much for me to like her.
I got down on my knees and I prayed to God, bartering that if he help me beat my video game I would clean my room. My mother had been begging me to clean my room, almost to the point of tears, for weeks and in an attempt to make both God and my mother content with me, I used it as leverage. After I prayed, my fingers hurt from how hard I was clasping my hands into one another, my forehead was indented with flakes from my bedroom carpet which I had pressed my face firmly into. From birth to age 10 the hardest I had ever prayed was over a video game, so much so that it caused my hands to ache, but not so much so that it impeded my ability to use the controller of which I used to beat the game the very next try and I cleaned my room happily.
Last night I saw a shooting star while waiting for a taxi in Berkley with my friends, and upon it I wished to God for the fortune of happiness. I told no one what I saw, what I wished for because in the fog of the night was a whisper that it fell for me only. A few nights before that I cried out to God in a nightmare so horrifying I could think of no escape other than his name, a name that for me has no meaning in a Christian sense but holds weight in the sense that sometimes, it is faith that is all I am left with. I have never questioned the existence of God, if for no other reason than I have seen enough of the Devil to merit belief in his counter.
It struck me odd, as I made my wish upon the falling bits of alien universe that I wished for happiness, because it is a wish I have always made in the form of material wealth and success. Every birthday candle I have ever blown out was extinguished with the requesting winds of a selfish thirst never to be quenched. I remember one year I wasted a birthday wish on a boyfriend, which I got and quickly wished I hadn't. Every shooting star before last nights shooting star was gazed upon with eyes that sought out desires of flesh and things I could touch.
It struck me odd because it was the first time happiness became something to wish for under the power of God, and because it was not that long ago, in the timeline of my life on the timeline of time, that I strained my fingers into themselves begging God, suffocated by the strain of tears, to help me beat a video game; and to come from that being the prayer that needed to be answered in order for me to continue living, to now being a time when happiness is a prayer so badly in need of answering that all I can do to keep from jumping off the Golden Gate bridge is to have faith that the same something that helped me beat that game when I was 10 or get that boyfriend I thought I wanted but didn't, will guide me to the very answer I need in order to continue breathing now.
I remember watching a documentary on meteors a few years ago, in it it was said that most meteors burn up in the atmosphere and hit the earth or the ocean at the size of a bean or a softball and as I watched the star disperse into the West, I wondered to myself the size of the splash a falling meteor would make in the middle of the ocean, of which my wish was surly bound. I wondered how many of those splashes sailors might see, or cargo ship workers coasting from the coast of Japan across the Pacific to deliver toasters and televisions to department super stores on the coast of California, how many of those splashes are witnessed by people and how many different things are wished upon those sinking stones from space. How many of those sunken meteors rest at the bottom of the sea with mine and how many of them were bestowed the responsibility of happiness, the responsibility of God.
When I was little, my father's friend Yolanda gave me a yellow stone about the size of my palm after I was forced to attend a gruesome baptist sermon and engraved into the stone were the words, "If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed,
you could say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it would
move. Nothing would be impossible." And I think it's funny how my faith has grown since then, from the size of a mustard seed to a bean.
And sometimes from a bean to a softball. .
