Catherine Lacey - Pew

I F YOU EVER NEED TO and I hope you never need to, but a person cannot be sureif you ever need to sleep, if you are ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones, and youre walking along a dark road with no one, and youre not sure how long youve been walking, and you keep looking down at your hands and not recognizing them, and you keep catching a reflection in darkened windows and not recognizing that reflection, and all you know is the desire to sleep, and all you have is no place to sleep, one thing you can do is look for a church.

What I know about churches is that they usually have many doors and often at least one of those doors, late at night, has been left unlocked. The reason churches have so many doors is that people tend to enter and leave churches in groups, in a hurry. It seems people have a lot of reasons for entering a church and perhaps even more reasons for leaving one, but the only reason Ive gone to a church was to sleep. The reasons Ive left a church were to avoid being caught sleeping or because Id already been caught sleeping and was being asked to leave. Those are the only reasons I can remember, though Im having trouble lately with remembering. I left some place, began walking, slept in all those churches, then everything else happenedthats all I know.

I dont think theyre so greatchurches. I dont think theyre so great at all. Thats not what I mean when I say you can go to one when youre tired. Im not talking about grace or deliverancea person cannot really speak of such things. What I mean is a church is a structure with walls and a roof and pretty windows that make it so you cant see outside. Theyre like casinos in that way, or shopping malls or those big drugstores with all the aisles, music piped in from somewhere, the endless search for that final thing.

But a church is also a building, often a sturdy building, and it can keep the outside far from you and when the outside is far enough from you, that is when a person can sleep. One thing it seems that every body needs is to sleep, and one thing people might not always have when they need it is a place to sleep or enough time to travel to a place where they can sleep, and soa church. Maybe a church will fix this problem for you someday or maybe it already has.

For some time, I only slept in churches. A few nights I tried to sleep in some woods or a bathroom stall or behind a gas station, and I took a few good naps in a cemetery, but the only place I could ever sleep for any real time back then was a church. Since then I am not sure Ive completely fallen asleep or woken up. Days and nights unspool together. Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. Ive received no word from deaths brother. I have not entered a church in some time.

The large churches, thats the sort of church youll want to look for if you need to sleep. The large churches have more doors that might be unlocked and more unlit spaces between all the buildings and rooms and hallways and playgrounds and gymnasiums and a kitchen or two and sometimes they even have a smaller chapel next to the larger one and the smaller chapel is almost always left unlocked. Also, the people that go to a large church are often too various to agree about anything in particular, so if you are caught sleeping there, the person catching you will likely not have a clear idea about how to proceed with getting rid of you (whether to call the police or the pastor, whether to give you something or take something from you) and people who are unsure of how to proceed are easy to escape. I have done this again and again. It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that churchso vast, so many roomsto do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.

I dont know how it all came to this.

It seems that time is somewhere else and what I can see here is not the present, but is, instead, the future, an eventual future, and somehow the present moment is back there somewhere I cannot reach and Im stuck living here, in some future time. This body hangs beneath me, carries me around, but it does not seem to belong to me, and even if I could see them, I would not recognize my own eyes.

Now, never sleeping, I think often of the way life blinks at you when waking. I miss that kind of beginning, being given another day, taking another day, something thats yours, only yours, only yours and everyone elses.

If you do manage to have a nights sleep in a church, youll notice how nice it is to wake up there. It will almost make you want to believe in God if you dont believe in God, and if you do believe in God, it will be a nice pat on the back for you. It must be so nice to be patted on the back in this way, to walk always followed by this constant, gentle pat.

I N A GAS STATION BATHROOM piss on the floor, tampon machine, urinal, an open stallI locked the door and stripped bare to throw water on my skin.

In a cracked mirror I saw these legs, saw these arms. I shut my eyes and tried to remember that body, but under shut lids the mind saw nothing, could not remember in what it was living. Again, I opened my eyessaw this body. Maybe wider in some places, narrower in others, and some parts were soft, and some were firm, and where my legs met, there was something I knew to protect, though I could not say why.

When I put clothes on again, all memory of what this body was or is vanished beneath the cloth. It must be that Iwhatever I amam lying on the floor of a canoe, lying there, looking up at the sky. I am unable to sit up or move. I cannot remember getting into the canoe. Sometimes I hear people speaking to the canoe as if they are not aware that I am in here. Yes, thats what it feels like, what living feels like. Why is it so difficult to say as much? It never seems I can describe it clearly enough.

Once someone said I had a slender neck, a womans neck, they said, a womans neck growing from the thick shoulders of a man, but maybe it was the other way aroundslender shoulders and a thick neck. Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else Ive been told. I look at my skin and I cannot say what shade it is. I look into a mirror and see nothing in particular. It seems I am sitting somewhere within all this skin and muscle and bone and fat and hair. Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained? Over time, I know, bodies changethey expand and contract, skin turns papery or thick, new bodies grow within other bodies, limbs grow musky and must be cleaned, organs smuggle tumors through the darkbut isnt there something else? Something unseen. Why cant we ever speak to it?