When Steve’s college girlfriend, Anni, tells him that her twin sister has uncovered memories of their pastor–father sexually abusing her, Steve refuses to believe it. Anni’s father is his hero. As a religious major in college, Steve longs to follow his soon-to-be father-in-law into the ministry. But as he witnesses Anni’s PTSD-like symptoms firsthand, he begins to suspect that the story is true and that Anni was abused as well.
Anni’s family begins to see a therapist. Steve, right after their marriage, agrees to see her as well. Only when the therapist gets too close to the sexual abuse does the family break from therapy—all but Anni, her two sisters, and Steve. Anni’s parents and Steve’s mother blame this therapist for planting false memories and brainwashing Steve. This incites an all-out offensive of harassment and stalking by the church community, extended family members, and friends—to destroy the therapist’s career and save “the kids” from the cult of therapy. Denying the voice to the victim who is finally brave enough to raise it only compounds the trauma and forces the four young adults to wrestle with mental health and addiction issues.
The five-chapter alternating thread in the memoir shows Steve after his divorce from Anni in a new, tumultuous relationship where he is given the gift of a son but indicates how more healing work needs to be done. This front story provides the necessary frame to explore and introduce themes in his marriage with Anni, culminating in the climax of a high-drama ecclesiastical court scene before a tribunal of Presbyterian elders.
With its focus on courageous, often humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, and lyrical writing, BEFORE OUR BODIES is a story about truth-telling and transformation outside the fold of religious doctrine and dogma. And, ultimately, the message is one of forgiveness—of others, for sure, but also of oneself—the surest path to “salvation.”
First 5 Pages:
Stellar Emanations
When the heart of a star runs out of fuel, it collapses until it cannot be squeezed anymore. The pressure becomes too intense, and the energy bounces back. In this shockwave after the implosion, the high energy particles known as cosmic rays near the speed of light and for fleeting moments outshine galaxies.
We’re all born of this process, made of the dead star stuff from supernovas.
Give or take several hundred million years later, a figure appears—an earlier version, I see, of myself—rolling in on the surf. He crawls from the water and stretches out on the sand, all the light sucked into the black hole where his heart used to sit.
Still, he needs to get up. He needs to live. This is the beginning—not the end. I tell him this. I say, You should go on a date. What’s the worst thing that can happen?
****
My divorce is a few months from being finalized when I drive up to Summerland, a small coastal town near Santa Barbara, to meet a woman I’ve connected with on a dating site. During our conversation at the coffee shop, I find myself rubbing my thumb against the base of my ring finger, searching for my phantom wedding ring.
The date doesn’t go well.
After she leaves, I sit reading, every so often glancing over at a woman sitting with two others at a picnic table across the courtyard, in profile, with her long blonde hair and cute little dog. She reminds me of someone, but I can’t get a good look at her. When she passes my table with her dog later, I say, “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“That depends on if you’ll take a walk with me or not.”
I say her name. “Janay.”
She smiles and reaches out a hand—in greeting or to help me up.
Janay was a consultant who helped with the reorganization of a company I worked for a decade earlier. I knew she had flown up from Santa Barbara to Portland at that time, but to find her here after all these years seems like a miracle.
We walk on the beach with her dog. She wears red earmuffs not for the cold but to block the irritation of wind in her ears. She talks of her dating life since I knew her and how her oldest childhood friend has told her not to show all her crazy upfront. She laughs wildly and trots off to squat in the upper sand to pee, asking me to cover for her.
Her hair whips her face in the coastal breeze when she returns.
I brush it away from her cheek. “Is it naturally blonde?”
She flips one end of it, faux flirty. “Yep. I get this from my Swedish side.” She pulls out a flask from her red down jacket, unscrews it, throws back a mouthful, wipes her mouth, passes it to me. “And this from my Czech.”
How funny and wild she is. Vibrant, positively bouncy.
Nothing like my wife. Or ex. I’ve got to start thinking of her as my ex. It will be easier to do once we sign the papers and the tan lines on my ring finger fill in.
I ask Janay about her work. She picks up a stick and draws overlapping circles like a Venn diagram in the sand. She explains by way of X’s and O’s her corporate development and management businesses and her work with environmentally sustainable products. Most of it is hard to track.
“What do you think?” she says.
“I think it’s a miracle to have found you. Where have you been all this time?”
“Right here. Waiting for you.”
I laugh and take out my phone. I snap a photo. “Our first selfie.”
Then I chase her and her dog to the edge of the beach.
In the small grassy area at the edge of the parking lot is a birthday party. Several elementary-aged kids line up in front of a piñata hanging from a tree. On the piñata is a peace symbol. A kid in a blindfold takes two frenzied swings with a plastic bat. Behind him, the others cheer at every thump and the rattle of candy inside.
Janay and I find it hilarious to see these children beating a peace symbol. I take it as a sign that she has a similar twisted sense of humor as I do. Signs are everywhere. We snap pictures of it, catching the bat in a mid-swing blur at golden hour, the sun dropping behind the oil derricks far out in the Pacific Ocean with the Channel Islands beyond.
****
The brief loss of consciousness during orgasm in French is called la petite mort, for “the little death.” With Janay, starting that first weekend, I die a lot. Even if her porn-like articulations seem put on—one eye always open to see how I’m enjoying the show (very much indeed)—she is a necessary opiate for the pain of my divorce, my body after our sessions in bed convulsing as if coming out of a Jell-O mold.
I sit in bed to study the vision board hanging on the wall. In the busy collage of cut-outs from magazines is a man in a suit, a groom next to his bride. They’re laughing together as they shove cake into each other’s mouths.
Janay says it’s a picture of me though we look nothing alike.
“The groom?” I laugh. “What do you mean?”
“I’m a psychic, silly. I knew you were coming. I manifested you.”
Dating is so new to me after almost two decades with one woman that I tell myself this is how it is. Or I want to believe that. For even with my ex, I hadn’t felt as desired—so quickly and worshipfully, somewhat possessively—as I do with Janay. She loves my shoes, my voice, my poetry, my hands. She talks of our aligned astrology charts and wants to paint me as a king on a chair and herself as a large panther curled at my feet. For some reason, I find this alluring. And other things, as well. How she wears the red earmuffs whenever going outside to avoid the wind in her ears. Or how she sleeps with a facemask and earplugs and over the earplugs wears the kind of heavy headsets that might be seen by an air traffic marshaller on a tarmac.
Not only is she smart, funny, and sexy, but this other side of her, her sometimes charmingly phobic and overly sensitive and neurodivergent side, reminds me of some of the musician and artist friends I left behind in Portland.
That first weekend is the Super Bowl. We house-hop around Summerland, and she raises the flag of the relationship to all her friends.
Look how amazing he is—a poet!
One of her male friends corners me at halftime. He’s on the business development team of one of those nebulous X’s of her Venn diagram. How is it possible that it was only two days earlier when she drew that in the sand? It’s like we’ve already traveled through many galaxies together.
“Careful, brother. Janay’s a real black widow if you know what I mean.” He slices his hand across his throat at the same time Janay comes up behind us. “Ha ha,” he says when seeing her. He slaps me on the back and steps away. “Good luck.”
She whispers, “He’s only jealous. He’s been trying to get into my pants for years.”
If I find this strange, I do not mention it in my journal after this magical weekend with Janay. Not that I have much time to reflect upon it now that I’m spending every spare moment with her. Janay is so opposite to my ex in how she takes charge of a room and makes a lot of money and wants me—all of me, and now—and I’m caught up in the spell. I do note how unnerving it is to be at the center of her vision board world. But I’m going with it and want it, I need it, and more of it. Because isn’t all this attention endearing? Look how much she cares about me.
That week, she sends me a photo of a smashed horse pucky on the beach, flattened into a heart shape. Love is everywhere!!! she texts, with a string of emojis.
She’s right. Just look—I tell myself—at these selfies and social media posts and the smashed heart-shaped shit and try to say otherwise.
Signs are everywhere. Love is everywhere. And isn’t love enough?
For a time, it’s all peace symbols and vision board manifestations with Janay.
What I’m not willing to see is what I’m looking at all the time. HowI want to be possessed by love. To lose myself in someone. And perhaps be consumed by them.
But why? For what purpose?
Because my life has been constructed with small-minded beliefs and micro-judgments I’m still putting out onto the world. I’m made of nothing but papier-mâché. And I’m longing for somebody to take up the goddamn bat. Perhaps this is what I think I need to prove—earn, even—my existence. It’s part of an old and buggy program that says, If I’m not feeling bad about myself then how do I know I’m alive?