Letter From God

I was on a mission. It was spring of my senior year of high school – graduation was upon us. I was about to leave that old Catholic school building forever – with its rotting tile, noisy radiators, and gym-atorium (a gym that is also an auditorium) that perpetually smelled of cafeteria grease. But before I could leave, there was one thing I needed to do. One thing – or else my four years will have been wasted – one quintessential teenage experience. I know what you may be thinking that one thing was – and I want to assure you that I was not that cool to be on a mission to lose my virginity. I was a tall, lanky, prude, who was about to graduate into the “real world,” as an adult, and I had never been kissed.

I was invisible in high school. Especially to boys. It would still be many years before I would come out of the closet as gay, and in high school, the thought hadn’t really occurred to me yet. I had crushes on boys, especially the pretty ones. Although it seemed like I was extra invisible to the boys I had crushes on. This one time, in the choir room, I’m sitting in the back row, right behind my crush. I loved looking at the back of his head with his broad shoulders and glorious hairline. I noticed ever detail, every freckle, the way the afternoon sun caught the color of his hair. It was my favorite part of the day. One day, I hear him lament that he didn’t have a date for prom yet.

Now’s my chance! “I’ll go to prom with you!” I chirp from behind him. Silence. Pretending not to hear me. “I’ll go to prom with you!” I gargle as a feel myself sink into my blue, posture correcting choir chair – a difficult thing for my body to do, since the chairs are designed to force you to sit up straight.

Out of the excruciating silence I hear “I’ll go to prom with you!” as one of the other boys mocked and mimicked my pathetic attempt to be seen. I wanted to bite my tongue off. How could I have been so stupid? At least no one could say I didn’t have a date from lack of initiative.

There I was a month away from graduation, and despite some other clumsy attempts, I had never been on a first date, and never had a first kiss. If I ended up going through all of high school without being kissed, when would it ever happen? I asked myself. What kind of adult has never been kissed? What was it about me that made me so undesirable? How does a person go four years in a cramped building with the horniest of all God’s creatures – the American teenager – and not even have one peck on the lips?

Sure, I could have gone up to one of these boys, even the one who made fun of me, grabbed their face, and kissed them myself, but that wouldn’t have solved my problem. I needed to be wanted. I needed to be seen. If the horniest, most desperate teenage boys collectively decided that they didn’t want me, who would? Who would ever want me?

“Put your romantic life in God’s hands,” said the Catholic teenage self-help book my parents bought me for Christmas. In my mind, it made sense. With just a month until graduation and the general consensus among my male classmates that I was un-kissable, it would take a miracle. I prayed every night. Every single night. But nothing happened and graduation was getting closer.

Sometimes I would try different tactics with God to get what I prayed for, like passive aggressiveness: “Of course I never should have asked you, God. You don’t actually care!” Or flat-out aggression: “DO IT! MAKE IT HAPPEN! YOU WON’T.” Anything I could do to get God’s attention: “Come on, God, don’t you see? Don’t you see this pain? Don’t you see how lonely I am? Don’t you see how afraid and confused I am?”

Silence. Even the all-seeing God didn’t seem to notice me.

When it came time for the annual religious retreat for seniors, I saw an opportunity. I felt like there’s something special about a retreat. God might be listening a little extra hard. With so many people there praying, God would have to pay attention. He would have to. And we, the students, could ask God for whatever we want and the other students would be witnesses. Yes! I’m going to confront the God face to face. I’m going to go on this retreat, and I’m going to ask God why he won’t let me have my first kiss, I thought to myself.

Our retreat took place in an empty wing of an old Catholic retirement home, with pastel colored plastic-covered furniture, and the feeling of being in a hospital. I hated retirement homes. They reminded me of my grandparents’ last years, watching them decline mentally and physically. I could remember the smell of the nasty food, and the feeling of retreating to the hallway when overcome with emotions at seeing my grandparents in their sad little rooms. Now I was sleeping in one of those same kinds of rooms, with a quiet roommate I barely spoke to for the last four years of high school.

“So, they put us together, huh?” I tried to spark a conversation. She meekly nodded and forced a smile. “They say these weekends get very emotional. Do you think you’ll cry?” I continued. She shrugged. “They won’t get me to cry!” I said proudly. After all, I was on a mission. I was like a disgruntled customer in the divine market. I was not there to cry. I was there to make a formal complaint to the heavenly manager, and I got my chance on the third night.

We were sitting in a circle with our retreat leader, one of our teachers, around the assortment of old furniture, with some sitting on chairs, on beds, and some on small cushions on the cold medical floor. In the center of the circle was a candle. Our retreat leader held a crucifix in her hands and explained that she would pass it around and that when we got the crucifix it was our turn to pray out loud and ask the group to pray for something for ourselves. This was it! But as my classmates started expressing their own prayers and wishes, I didn’t feel as bold as I did earlier.

“Please let my parents stop using drugs,” one classmate prayed. “Please let me find a safe home,” another said. My stomach sank. I felt ridiculous. I had been so hellbent on strongarming God into giving me a first kiss before high school ended, and my classmates were dealing with some really big problems. “Please let my parent find a job,” said another. It was nearing my turn, and I was scrambling for something different to pray for. I couldn’t possibly ask God for a first kiss. I felt silly. I felt spoiled and entitled. As I scrambled to find something else to pray for, these feelings became more intense. I couldn’t think of anything. I had a lot to be thankful for. I had parents who loved me and supported me, who could provide for me. I was going to a good college and my parents were paying for it. I had advantages that some of my classmates would never have, and here I was thinking about a first kiss. Maybe I had been incredibly selfish asking for more. You can’t have everything.

As my turn drew nearer my stomach felt like it was on fire. People cried and prayed alongside their peers. What would they think about me? Now there was only one person left before my turn. Would I pray for a first kiss or not? I had spent so much time fretting over not being seen, and all the while, I did not allow myself to see the pain that others were in. I felt shame. I felt a need to ask for forgiveness. It was then my turn.

The person next to me passed me the crucifix, signaling that it was my turn to speak. I squeezed it hard trying to find the right words. “Um… God…” I didn’t have any words. I figured I might as well ask for the first kiss so everyone could see how horrible I had been, and why I needed to ask them to forgive me for my blindness. “This may sound like a silly thing to ask for, but… I’m seventeen and I’ve never been kissed.” A wave of embarrassment washed over me, but also profound sadness. Saying it out loud in a room full of people made me feel everything so deeply. I couldn’t even finish the sentence without crying, but I continued, “And,” I said to my classmates, “I want to ask all of you for forgiveness, because so many of you have real problems, and I’m asking for something so small,” I started to choke on my sobs. My face was burning with shame. I longed for invisibility. I just wanted this to be over. “So, I’m sorry and I ask God to answer all of your prayers. I’m sorry, everyone.” I passed the crucifix to the next person, but they didn’t speak. Silence. That dreaded, horrible silence.

“God…”

A voice broke the silence. It was the retreat leader.

“We want Christen to know, that we are crying with her and it’s not a silly thing to ask for. It’s a very important thing and it’s deeply meaningful. We want her to know that she deserves to feel loved and wanted, and we pray that you make her first kiss special.”

I looked up. She was right. Everyone was crying.

The girl next to me put her arm around me to comfort me. Everyone started agreeing and nodding their head, “Yeah that’s important. It should be special,” they said with encouragement. “Yeah, it’s just some guy slobbering on your face. It’ll probably suck but it’s a really big thing,” another laughed. We laughed. We cried. We moved on in the prayer circle. I had been seen. I had been heard. I had been loved.

On the last day of the retreat, we were told to write a letter to our self, imagining that God wrote it to us. We are supposed to remind ourselves of what we learned that weekend. It would be mailed to us a year later and we would be able to see if we were living up to those promises. I had made peace with the idea that maybe I wouldn’t be kissed by graduation, but I had hoped that maybe in a year, the special prayer would come through. With a bit of cheeky humor (and a little left over passive aggressiveness) I write, on behalf of God, “Dear Christen, Hopefully, you’ve had that kiss (wink),” putting that last part in parentheses, in the hopes that I would read it a year later and have my wish fulfilled. Except, a year later it still hadn’t happened. I wasn’t as anxious about it as I had been before, though. I had a feeling that there was a bigger plan, and that when the time was right, it would happen. The letter, oddly enough, also never came in the mail a year later. It got lost in the mail. Go figure.

My first kiss would eventually happen in my sophomore year of college. It really was special. So, I waited two years instead of one: who’s counting? There are people who have had to wait longer, and people who are still waiting, and wondering if it will ever happen for them. All I know is that I left that retreat knowing that some things in life just don’t have an ultimatum on them – there was no expiration date for when I would reach my desirability – no ‘point of no return’ – and it definitely wasn’t age 17.

Nevertheless, three days after my first kiss, I got a letter in the mail, with a note that said, “Sorry, Christen, this got lost in a pile of papers, and there were a whole bunch of letters that we weren’t able to send out last year.” It was, of course, my “letter from God.” One human error in filing, and it arrived a year late, but for me, the timing was perfect. I opened my letter from God, and read, “Dear Christen, Hopefully, you’ve had that kiss (wink).”