I should have been asleep still, not sitting in a pew, tugging at my poorly fitting dress. It was a garish yellow, and it made me feel old and young all at once. Well, really everything made me feel young and old all at once. I suppose that was seventeen encapsulated. Not that I would have admitted it out loud to anyone.
I cringed away as my five-year-old sister wiped crumbs from her fingers onto my freshly shaven legs. “Ellie, sit up on the bench,” I hissed as I tugged under her arms and pulled her up onto the maroon velvet pew. She squirmed, but relented, returning to munching loudly on pretzels, much louder now that she was nearer. Henry sat between her and Mom, doodling in a notebook.
The microphone screeched with feedback as a speaker adjusted it lower. “Bishop called me a couple of weeks ago to speak on the topic of the Holy Ghost. Now my first thought was—”
I exhaled loudly and slouched in my seat. Not that. Anything but that.
We talked about the Holy Ghost in class last week, and everyone had a heartfelt story of when whispers saved them from car crashes or helped them choose their date for prom. One girl even said she felt warm when walking around the temple grounds.
I had never felt any of that. It was some supernatural experience that either everyone was lying about, or I was faulty and broken, unable to hear whispers and feel strange warmth. Sure, I felt things before, and maybe it was from the Holy Ghost, but I didn’t know the way everyone else did.
Not to be left out in class, I made up a story of when a prompting helped me to find my car keys when I was running late for work. A teacher had smiled and thanked me. My insides crawled at the attention, but worse would have been the anticipatory attention of everyone waiting for a response for far too long before deciding I wouldn’t answer and just moving on.
Well, the story was partially true. I had been running late for work. And I had said a desperate prayer to find my keys. Only, I didn’t find them. I had to call a friend for a ride, and I was written up for being late for my shift. So much for divine help in the small moments of my life.
“When we choose righteousness, we choose the guidance of the Holy Ghost. And He will attend to us as we listen to Him.”
I crossed my arms and tried to keep from seething. Mom tended to look down on such behavior in sacrament meeting. Meanwhile, Ellie had moved back to the floor, kicking her legs while breaking crayons in half.
I was the oldest, but that didn’t make me just a small adult. Most of my friends were on their phones, while I had to leave mine at home and strive to not dissociate in the middle of another droning talk.
I chose righteousness when I could. I made a cake for Mom’s birthday last month. I told a coworker when their shoes were untied. I had good friends. I followed the rules.
So where was my warmth? Where was my direction?
I turned my head, unable to look at the speaker any longer with her wonderful tales that I couldn’t relate to.
Mom was braiding Ellies’s hair, her fingers tangling up in the silky curls I waved my sister over and took the rubber band from Mom’s hand. She smiled a small smile and bent to gather up crayon remnants from the floor.
My throat tightened as I watched her for a second longer. She didn’t deserve this. Didn’t deserve to be the lone adult in a row with kids in various states of unrest. Not that I could change it, but she didn’t deserve it.
Yet she still chose to attend church.
As my fingers moved down my sister’s hair, tugging tight with each turn of a strand, I wondered why Mom went through this every week. Why did she haul us to church when week after week it was the same thing? Snacks crushed into the carpet, whisper-fighting, boring talks.
I endured church because she asked me to be there, but who asked her? What made her scramble every Sunday to get us all into a pew together?
I sent Ellie back to Mom after I twisted on the rubber band, where she finally settled, wrapped in Mom’s arms. The speaker’s words drifted through my willful ignorance of the talk.
“The Holy Ghost is how I know I’m seen by Christ.”
Seen? I clenched my jaw. No one saw me like that.
Not that I would let them. Otherwise, everything would crumble, and I would melt into a puddle of my own worthlessness, and then everyone else would see it too. See that pain that I pushed deeper and deeper with every opportunity. See the unworthiness. The mediocrity.
“I see you.” The words came from over my shoulder, and I whipped around, searching for whoever read my mind.
My neighbors sat behind us, coloring away at various books. A few pews back, Blake flicked a glance at me, and I turned before my cheeks could burn too brightly.
I stared into my lap, hearing only the pounding of my heart. A folded piece of paper slipped onto my lap. Henry pushed it insistently, so I unfolded the page. There was a rough sketch of me and someone holding my hand, their pencil lines shades lighter than my own. I wanted to disappear entirely. Had he seen me looking back at Blake?
I glared at my newly ordained deacon brother, but he just gave a meaningful look up to the podium. He leaned over and whispered, “The Holy Ghost is always with you.”
I turned my gaze down to the drawing on my lap and bit my tongue to keep from responding. Because all I would say at that moment was that I didn’t believe that, couldn’t believe that. I didn’t feel the Holy Ghost with me always. Or ever, really.
In my mind, the images on the page started to shift and change. The pencil lines and eraser castoffs wavered on the white paper.
And then—I was in the sketch of myself. Literally went from awkward human flesh to pencil squiggles. Complete with too-long arms and thin hair strands.
What in the actual world?
The other figure drew my attention as its lightly drawn figure took a more familiar form, the sharp pencil lines softening and shifting. A small woman with white hair, whom I couldn’t quite place, yet she seemed so familiar. Her eyes squeezed shut as she smiled. “I see you.”
I scoffed. “You see me? With your eyes closed?” I could not believe that I was speaking to pencil lines, that I was pencil lines. Had I passed out? Or fallen asleep? It had been a long shift the night before, and I got home just past midnight . . . But no, Mom would never let me sleep through church. If I were asleep, she would prod me back awake.
“You know me, child.” The vaguely familiar woman’s brow quirked up, and my recognition blossomed into knowledge.
“Great-Grandma?” I tilted my pencil-drawn head, making strands of hair scatter across my back.
The expanse of white around us, the white of paper that my brother left blank around our two figures, was endless. It was just the two of us: my great-grandmother and I.
“My little thimble-stealer.”
Warmth spread through my chest at the use of her nickname for me. It had been so many years since I heard her voice. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her.
“Why are you here, Gram?” I choked out the words, surrounded as I was by the scent of raspberry pie and rose lotion, the sound of a whirring sewing machine, and the comfort of a carefully repaired teddy bear. I almost couldn’t breathe from the memories and love filling the void around me.
She took two strides up to me and took my hands in hers. “You needed comfort.”
“And, what, you just appeared in Henry’s drawing?” My eyes stung like I was about to cry, but I would not. That was too . . . cliché.
Gram’s hands gently squeezed mine, her eyes and smile just as they had been ten years before. “You know this too.”
Cliché notwithstanding, my status as a pencil drawing notwithstanding, I cried. Not just a few tears: chest heaving, sobbing, drippy nose, and all.
Because I did know.
Her soft voice broke through my embarrassing noises. “I see you.”
And that’s when I cried all over again. Because I was seen. She saw me, and I was pretty sure the Holy Ghost saw me. But there I was, laid bare, a puddle of emotions like I knew I would be.
I was seen.
And it was good. Good to be seen. Even in that state.
I rubbed a stick finger hand across my damp, hand-drawn face. I felt all the pain of being me—and it didn’t hurt me. I hung my head and let out a single laugh. “It would take falling into a child’s drawing for me to know what the Spirit feels like. I can’t just feel it every day like everyone else does.”
Gram lifted my chin with a soft hand, and I met her gleaming eyes. In those eyes, I saw myself braiding my sister’s hair moments before. I saw the dinner I burned but somehow still salvaged earlier in the week. From there, snatches of moments scrolled fast: when I slammed my brakes fast enough to not run over a cat, when I cried inside the walk-in freezer at work, when I returned a book I borrowed with a note of thanks to my friend, and on and on and on.
My head spun with these flashes of my life. Then I saw a memory that was not my own: a fight between my friend Robin and her brother, yelling words that I couldn’t discern. She stormed off to her room and lay on her floor, splayed out and crying.
My penciled hand reached out to her, but of course, I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t comfort the anguish that crossed her face. I was just a stick figure in a child’s drawing, in a memory, somehow.
Then her phone lit up with my name across the screen. She sat up, a smile just starting, and answered the phone . . . Then we were in the car, and she was taking me to work the day I couldn’t find my keys.
I fell out of that memory, back into the paper world, with Gram nearly glowing from the brightness of her joy.
“The Holy Ghost made me lose my keys?” I snapped my mouth shut, annoyed at myself for such a question. “I mean, the Spirit isn’t just a feeling. Sometimes He works through other people. The comfort isn’t just warmth inside; it’s warm hugs from others and stuff. Right?” It was a revelation—the Spirit wasn’t just felt as whispers and feelings inside, but as actions outside by people, by me.
“He is with you always. He sees you as I see you. He sees everyone. If there is good, the Holy Ghost is in it. If there is peace, He is in it. If there is a need of comfort, He is there. He sees you—and loves you.”
I collapsed into the warmth of comfort, given by my Gram, because of the Spirit.
Whole, seen, loved, protected, warm.
And the drawing snapped away.
Henry was shaking my knee. “You okay?”
I swallowed, nearly choking on the joy that overfilled me. I hugged my brother and whispered into his hair, “I am more than okay. Thank you. I love the drawing.”
I folded the paper and pressed it to my chest before slipping it into my pocket.
The intermediate hymn began, and I glanced over at my family. I saw them then, really saw them, and I was glad I went to church that day. Perhaps being able to feel the Spirit through other people was what brought Mom there each Sunday.
Henry’s random drawings, Ellie’s sweet moments, and Mom’s steadiness all gave me comfort, and that was the Holy Ghost. Mom glanced over at me with a raised eyebrow, so similar to Great-Grandmother’s, and I mouthed, “I love you.” A tear snaked down my face, and a matching one fell down her cheek.
I was enough in that moment, and I knew it. Not too young or too old, just enough. Just me.
