Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Five 2026

Design by Ashley Oetomo

A childhood of crisp collars and poking pencils into fake leather pew cushions. Holidays scripted by memory verses and soundtracked with earworm tunes. Nights of strained dinner table prayers and guilted scribbles on tissue-thin paper.

The pews I once sat in are now poked and prodded by yet another generation of children, doing so as pastors with a new wave of emotional intelligence murmur in the background. I see my face in theirs as they weasel around in their chairs; I see my naivety lost. I look back at the versions of myself that I have inhabited and shed. I see the faith that I have repelled and held.

I pray for contentment and I don’t get it. I look for it in bedrooms, meeting rooms, classrooms, public toilets, thickets and algorithms. I go overseas every couple of years just to make myself anew. I listen to the albums of those a few years older than me, grasping for my next revelation. I wait in the corridor for a door to open.

I’m in Italy. Work is a community farm forty kilometres east of Florence. They call it Firenze, so I do too. I nod as they say riso and pane; I laugh when they say cacca. Sue me. I work with the other volunteers: Lucia, Celeste, Diane, Lucile. I have a public cry about a boy from the motherland, about how hard it feels to be me. Lucia and I walk to the church down the road; she only speaks Italian, and I only speak English, but we’re best friends. It says “Dio è luce” in the stained glass, and Google Translate tells me that it means “God is light”. I feel sunbeams on my face, and I’m aware of transcendence.

I meet Antonio. He uses the word didactic; he describes an Emily King song as aquatic. He likes Victorian houses and reads Pitchfork reviews. He tells me that my eyebrows are too far apart and that if he dated me, he’d want me to cut my hair. He farewells by saying “ciao bella”; he tells me he’s never met anyone like me before. We move to Instagram. He looks through my tagged photos and finds me in posts from explicitly Christian spaces. He asks me if I still practice, and if I believe in promiscuity. I’ve never even used that word before. I tell him I’m working it all out. He can’t handle it; he wants to know–he wants to place me in a box. He becomes a keyboard warrior; I sob on the phone to my best friend; the first time she hears me cry. Ciao bella.

I read Little Women. Half of it. Louisa May Alcott talks about heavenly love and convinces me that it’s comforting and reliable. So, I search for God. I inspect grass lowlands, long coastlines, under rocks in the back garden. Centipedes ignore me as they walk past; ladybirds land on me and then leave. The sun hides. I feel my Saturn returning like a reservoir tearing open inside of me.

I put glow in the dark stars on my bedroom ceiling to create magic myself. I go to concerts and stand waiting in the crowd to grow wings and ascend. I float on my back in rivers, contemplating Rayleigh scattering as I gasp for breath, hoping to dissolve into creation. In the mornings I stretch my hands toward the light that comes in from behind the blinds. I lay as long as I can until I have to rush; I dread the bureaucracy that awaits me. I wait and I keep waiting for God to feel close.

A farmer tells me that touching soil triggers dopamine. So I plunge my hands into brown earth, fingernails full, until I graze parts of myself I buried decades ago, while I was still learning the alphabet. 3-Hydroxytyramine doesn’t flood in; my hands just need washing. Four hundred days later, I sleep with three men in three nights. Their hands barely hold my body, let alone my soul. My soul caves in, scrunching up and lowering itself down to my feet. Its colour and light, relegated to my depths. I poke at it later, drunkenly trying to assess its needs, before falling asleep and slipping into routine that I despise. But God watches over me. Or does he just watch me?

I meet someone. He could be the kind of love I’ve dreamed of. But what about the people waiting in the wings of my life to meet me? And what about me, what about true knowledge of myself? What about God? I want to live one hundred different romances with one hundred different people; I want to be made whole. I want to live in the stories of love and faith and ambition that replay inside my head. I want to ebb and flow seamlessly, partake in the divine, be eclipsed by golden light. But my brain overworks and the tools hide. I cradle antidepressants and men less funny than myself. I trip and I stumble, knees scuffed red raw on the waiting room floor of my life.