Religion Hawes

A thread of contradictions stitches me together. The opposing threads that weave through me bear an irreplicable dichotomy. Each needle sinks into my fragile flesh, pulling me taut between motion and stillness, certainty and uncertainty. To live in this body is to dwell in purgatory, suspended between who I am and who I am becoming. Purgatory is often imagined as flame; mine was fluorescent lights, antiseptic air, and the quiet ache of muscles that refused to function. It began the first time my kneecap slipped out of place. What seemed like a fleeting injury unraveled into something larger—something closer to exile. As in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the day insisted on beginning again, indifferent to my collapse. I clung to the small hope that morning light itself was proof of continuation, even as I remained suspended between what was broken and what might yet be restored.

My mourning began on September 29th, 2022. I crumbled under the warm hues of the doctor’s office. My right kneecap continually slipped, carving me out internally. The betrayal from my own body was simply nauseating.

My world became tumultuous, yet hauntingly still. That stillness became its own teacher. I attacked books and feasted upon them with a hunger I had never known. I devoured words as though they could stitch me back together, searching for the same fractured identity I felt within my body. The labyrinthine sentences of Faulkner became a mirror for me, but also a lifeline — evidence that complexity could be carried, and even made beautiful.

My name is Religion. For years, I carried it like a burden, the way Faulkner carried Mississippi—as both origin and question, both anchor and chain. I was raised by two atheists, the irony carving space for another contradiction. Yet slowly, I began to see my name not as a weight, but as an opening — an invitation to wrestle with meaning.

December 22nd, 2022: I went under. Not with faith, not with hope, just a prayer, ragged and gasping. Not for salvation—but to let someone know I was afraid. Afraid of being forgotten, of being left alone in a hollow body.

I read the Psalms’ cries of lament and realized that suffering has always had a language.

Psalm 6:6 (ESV):

“I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.”

Religion is not certainty—it is reaching across the void, fumbling toward meaning, enduring the silence between questions and answers. In my waiting, as pain stretched into years, I began to see my name differently. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi, it became not just a place of heaviness but a source of vision, of voice, of persistence. Even sorrow taught me that silence can hold possibility.

The hunger came back stronger, as my left knee followed the course the right had trailblazed.

June 10th, 2023: I lay under the knife once again, becoming the needle-prick sensation that overtook skin and thought and word. The burning took my body, it took the space beneath my eyes. The fire that only God Himself could have kindled, and Satan could stoke. That burn claimed my body for itself. It turned what I knew into smoke, into dust. I was no longer a girl, a daughter, or even a being, but a pincushion. My Mama’s favorite, round as a stomach full of regret, wanting as much as eerie silence craves a whisper. Yet even then, I sensed that endurance itself was a form of defiance — that if I could survive the fire, I might emerge remade.

Sylvia Plath became a mirror for that fire. She could name the sensation of being consumed and still leave behind words like embers. Her poetry carried the scorch of confession, where destruction did not silence but demanded articulation. The Bell Jar gave form to the invisible weight that suffocated me, echoing the betrayal of my own body. She showed me that the ashes left after burning are not emptiness, but residue that can be shaped into language. Plath taught me that pain can be transfigured: not just endured, but sharpened into voice—luminous even in devastation.

Even now, scars stitch across my knees, not as afterthoughts but as scripture etched in flesh. They remind me that I am both wound and witness, both limited and limitless. Where others might see only damage, I read lines of survival—chapters that refuse erasure. I have come to know that the body remembers, and in its remembering, it writes. My scars are not endings but continuations, margins filled with fire and silence alike. Purgatory was never a grave; it was a passage, a refining. I remain suspended in becoming, shaped each day by the tension of opposites—fragility and strength, despair and hope, silence and song.

I do not claim triumph. Instead, I claim transformation. My injuries stripped away one version of myself, but literature offered me another: a way to endure, to question, to see meaning in contradiction. If being human means living in contradiction, then English is where I will thread those tensions into meaning, and where I will begin the next chapter of my story.