Hymn for the Invented Heart
By Matt Jones
My first girlfriend insists that I give myself to God, but at seventeen, I am really too young to believe in anything as sacred as that.
I go to church with her on Saturday nights and watch a guy with ripped jeans play guitar on stage. One night before a youth service I take half a bottle of Robitussin. This is called Robo-tripping. I am not into weed yet, just the legal stuff: nutmeg, catnip, cough medicine. I have limits. I have long hair to my shoulders and jawline acne. Her church is nondenominational. The minister sometimes talks about how to talk to your kids about The Da Vinci Code.
The Robitussin takes a really long time to kick in so I am sober for an entire sermon. I keep waiting for some sort of interesting visual or sensory hallucination but there is just this guy with an acoustic guitar praising Jesus, and my girlfriend who is waiting until marriage to have sex.
*
“First all belief is paradise,” Lisa Robertson writes, “So pliable a medium.” Okay, I think. I can wait, but I cannot promise. Love is patient, but I am not. What is it called when two competing truths live side by side in your chest?
It is hard to accept the idea that hands played a part in making me, but then we touch in my room with the door closed and I see: I am held together by paperclips and threads. The church’s minister says we are always on the precipice of ruin. Okay, ruin me. She grabs my wrist and tells me she feels like she is going to pee which I am sure means Orgasm. “Do not fear,” is what the scripture says, “Be not afraid.” She gives me a book called The Case for Christ and tells me that if I read it, I can start truly believing, but I just end up having more questions. I too abstain from things that I think are bad for reasons I can’t always explain, and when I do start getting high in the park near our high school, she disapproves.
When the Robitussin finally hits that night, I am already back at home in my own room. I feel drunk even though I have never been drunk before. Eternity itself, the word, feels long on my tongue, like spit dribbling down my chin. I call her from my bed and I am in a such a good mood because I have all of these records on my wall that I had taken from crates in my dad’s closet, and they are spinning. All of them. Earth, Wind & Fire, Boston, Journey, even Eddie Murphy’s Party All the Time. I’m not interested in a higher power, just different states of mind.
*
The poet Carolyn Kizer writes, “Believing I believe.”
The evidence for the thing, the thing itself.
I hear it as “Believing, I believe.” The difference is important but unnamable, alive only in the small pause where meaning resides, in the space between beats of the invented heart, the twin organ that moves not blood but feeling into the far reaches of each and every extremity.
At home, I call her on the phone and I curl my toes and marvel at the very construction of my hands. I am a cliché. I am a teenager deep in the throes of pure, brilliant sentiment. I rave about the guitar player from her church. I tell her that he has the voice of a million angels, and she is very, very happy and I am very, very fucked up and we are both, perhaps, in love. Either that or we believe we are, and who can really say which is more important? Who can really say what makes a thing real? Do not all interpretations belong to God?
I drift off to sleep and wake up in the morning with the phone still cradled to my ear, a pounding behind my eyes. It’s a kind of hangover. Punishment isn’t the right word, but the light does hurt my eyes.
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About Matt Jones
Jones’ essays have appeared in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, New England Review, Longreads, and Michigan Quarterly Review.