Outside of himself
Just three or so short years before finding complete and utter happiness, Marc was in a very different mood. No job. No clear ambition. Just a bass guitar, an indie-rock band, and a few good friends. I was one of them.
Whenever I visited the modest two-story condo he shared with three of our disheveled and disorganized 19-year-old mutual friends, Marc would ask, “Did you want to take me to Zia?” Zia was the record store indie-rock musicians went to when they needed more indie-rock. And yes, I usually did want to go there. It was the phrasing of his question I found funny. I don’t know, I often thought. Did I really want to take him there? I don’t recall ever having had that motive prior to visiting his poster-covered space in which Marc’s possessions orbited around a black Futon and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” movie poster, but he very frequently arrived at Zia’s parking lot on the back of my Honda scooter nonetheless.
A year later, while he occupied the teenage-boy sized bedroom in my father’s house in suburban Glendale, Arizona, next to my own, we had another of the epic philosophical conversations that were the core of our friendship, this one centered on religion. Having been yet another Christian child who strayed from the pew as a young adult Ñ a theme in our circle of friends ÑÊhe passed on a few of the stories that had previously bothered him enough to begin questioning his faith.
Well, not his faith, per se, but the logic of his faith.
As he saw it, there were far too many flaws in the logic of his religion for it to be truly believable. Supernatural feats delivered by otherwise perfectly average human beings. A god that claimed absolute righteousness and perfection, at the same time performing almost unspeakable acts of cruelty while being worshipped as benevolent. These things tugged at Marc, because the desire in him to explain the world away into some agreeable box is the very same desire that moved him to religion in the first place. Through his childhood, religion was the explanation. By sixteen, however, the dissonance began to wear thin, and it was at about the same time that the godless started inviting him to parties and asking about his record collection. Eventually, the tug was enough, and he reconsidered his views. He looked around, as many do, for other options that might better suit his spiritual needs. The more he looked around, the more he saw trends.
During the late-night living room conversation, he told me that every religion had a little bit of the puzzle right, but none of them had it all. We agreed that organized religion placed a barrier between God and the devout. An afterlife is possible, but in a very different way than the Christians of Marc’s past thought. Science tells us that energy doesn’t die, it changes forms. Energy, then, has to go somewhere, so ghosts and reincarnation and all sorts of other religious notions are indeed plausible, perhaps even likely. He told me about an old Native American myth that if you stab a man in winter, the steamed air that escapes from his body at the moment of death is his soul rising to its eternity. He talked about the Christian high school he attended. The popular guy. The insecure and pregnant sophomore. The palm trees in front of the school that strangely bent and twisted around like flexible plastic straws.
Marc didn’t seem particularly saddened or ashamed by the loss of his religion. But then, he was melancholic on his good days. Rather, he looked like a man who had simply let his brain win an argument that perhaps should have been left to his heart.
Over the next few months, he bent and twisted himself through a series of miniature hardships, some memorable, some not, that somehow each left him slightly more wanting than before. His band broke up. His friendships had weakened. The burgeoning relationship with his girlfriend had entered a dark hour. And he drifted for a while through a malaise that few noticed, including me. I wasn’t around much then; I was busy with my own problems, and we simply didn’t cross paths as frequently as in the old days. I never thought it would be permanent. But during some indistinguishable moment, when no one seemed to be watching, Marc turned his head and began to see a path.
Two years later, the next time I saw him, where this story started, he had settled into a job at Zia that eventually turned into a several-year stint as a store manager and a much longer stint as a music buyer. He had a girlfriend that everyone adored Ñ the same girl Ñ who was later diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and, after marrying Marc and giving birth to their two children, purchased a wheelchair. He had a growing relationship with an unorthodox church that eventually led to a counseling position and a life of piety.
Marc at 23 was a man who had rested his argument with logic, and subsequently, with love. With faith. With happiness. He was a man whose philosophical discussion was once again centered on religion, this time minus the dissonance.
Marc at 19 and 20 seemed, by contrast, an unfortunate apparition. A man who had fallen outside of himself. A man sitting just to the left of where he should have been. Just far enough away to become wholly disconnected.
It was ten years ago. Marc is now a media buyer for a Christian music distributor. He lives in Nashville with his wife and their two children.
He still has a bass guitar and a fine collection of indie-rock.
