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When I asked if he was upset, The Reason said he’d mourned the end of our relationship slowly, in private, for months and months. He’d gone through his own piecemeal mourning right in front of me, without a word, smuggled out like a house removed brick by brick. If I had really been paying attentio…

A sharp inhale from customer service. Of course it’s hard for me to do this, she said, canceling a line, but I will do it.

It sounded as if she were giving a lethal injection to a suffering pet, but it was just a phone line, a number, a nothing. I smiled and rolled my eyes at Sara, who smiled ba…

After The Reason sent that email, my appetite left, completely, for the first time in more than twenty years, and it was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear. Death was an illusion. I st…

The Amish had Rumspringa, but Methodists had no rite for testing a secular life. I stopped praying, stopped witnessing to kids at school, stopped protecting my temple from poisons like lust and cigarettes at the Waffle House. I expected that I would, like all biblical characters before me, be taugh…

When I began to lose my faith in God at fifteen, I lost my appetite, completely, for years, eating only because it seemed I should eat and never because my body had asked for it. A passage in Corinthians had been the compass for what to do with the spiritual liability of my flesh—the body is a temp…