If You're Friends With Jesus...

A middle-aged Japanese lady with angelic white hair approached me in front of the vitamin stand at Kichijoji station to ask if I was a Christian. She said her church was nearby and looked as though she would wait a hundred years for me to invite myself there. She glowed with satisfaction just to have spoken to me as I left her and her faith posed there, feeding wholesomely off one another in the rainy afternoon.

I was reminded of my heartbroken sophomore year in college, when a medical student, whose initials also happened to be LL, tried to show me Jesus Christ. Sobbing in a gray sweatshirt on my dormitory floor, I asked him if he’d ever been in love. He said he’d only been in love with JC. He would write me heartfelt letters from his medical school in Milwaukee, suggesting all the ways that JC could infuse my life with joys untold, asking me to please write back with my progress in finding Jesus.

My mind was too innocent at the time to realize it but just now, thinking about the ways that the intelligent, articulate LL inadvertently turned me off from believing that Jesus could help me, I feel quite sure that what he wanted most was to fuck me, and converting me to Christianity and then marrying me was the only way he could do it.

The End.