“Communion” by Julia Boughner

My first communion I wore white ballet flats. At those services they make the girls dress like brides– long white veils, white boleros over their shoulders– or like priests, in pale robes on feast days.

I took the communion in my hand, not on my tongue. After the mass all us girls had to wait on the side of the chapel as the Father took us one by one into a small room where we confessed our sins, and every time he chose another one of us he would laugh and promise he didn’t bite.

When it was my turn, I found the confessional booth was absolutely unlike how I’d imagined it (with the lattice screen between us, the single wooden stall). It was more an office, barely nice looking. There we sat on chairs next to each other and stared out the window onto the courtyard before us, neither turning our heads, and he asked me what I had to confess.

In sunday school they taught me that there are a few categories of sin, underneath which are vague misdemeanors. I had practiced what I would say and which of these generalities I would choose to feed him until he was satisfied. I was terrified of speaking my sin out loud, and yet it consumed me.

In second grade I pantsed my best friend on the playground and he started to cry, but I put my hands on his shoulders and made him promise not to tell anyone. I wouldn’t talk to him for three years after that because I felt so horrible and I knew God was going to punish me for bullying him.

I didn’t confess. I told the Father something about how I’d disrespected someone else (things or body were the two options you had to disrespect about a person, I’d learned in Sunday school. I think I chose body).

I don’t think my sin deserved an audience with God, now.

I think, I need to confess.

When I was in Spain I went to three basilicas. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was so busy with tourists during the hours they don’t hold mass that at the very top of the cross shaped floor, behind the organ that shimmers like falling water, there is a second set of pews completely shielded by wooden curtains where people can pray in quiet. I stared between the slats at the people in silence and on their knees.

The weight of piousness in places like that makes it difficult to stand. My hands missed my rosary in its red box in my closet at home, my tongue missed the body, the blood.

I could not speak or I’d disrupt the silence but I was confessing, over and over, to God who was so massive and present he was drawing it out of me– like I’d swallowed a magnet, and he was pulling it through the flesh of my chest with another.

I cannot forgive myself. But this is my confession.

Julia Boughner is pursuing a major in public health and epidemiology. She has loved writing since preschool, and has improved marginally. She is an avid explorer of the outdoors, the library, and the Taco Bell menu.