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religion's so lost on me.

i've never felt holy in my synogogue; only uncomfortable and out of place, my voice ringing tinny on the embossed metal walls.

nor have i felt moved in a church. the one christmas eve where i went to my ex's chapel for a service, i sunk deep into the musty-smelling pew while the minister talked about jesus and beleivers and followers.

i've never felt sacred in any place where you're supposed to feel god. it was something wrong with me, i thought. something fundamentally off. i was unable to feel the serene and unruffled holiness of everyone else. i looked at my mother in the shul - she always shut her eyes and looked like she had a headache. "it moved me," she would whisper to me afterwards over bitter synogogue-grade wine and eggy bread.

i sang with my eyes open, empty syllables with gutteral "ch"'s.

a sacred place? while religion always made me feel out of place, too hot, hypocritical, the outdoors - smell of grass and dirt underneath my fingernails, bite of wind against my face - that always put me in rapture. but still none of that sacredness, holy feelings that poets told me it was supposed to bring.

jutting into the river there is a strip of concrete peppered with fallen trees, aquatic grasses, goose crap. "the wingdam," rob told me the first time we walked down the dusty canal path. down a hill with a staircase formed by many pairs of feet before me, over rocks and onto the gravelly dam. it was night - the sound of the water, shushing endlessly and rapidly, overpowered the light of the moon, the reflections of streetlights on the delaware. i enveloped myself in that sound.

we sat on the end, the rounded protuberance that landed square in the middle of the river. our legs dangled over the rush that looked, in the night's veil, like waving strips of reflective mylar, like a surface i couldn't push my fingers through. i tried, and i could; the water felt cold and infinitely deep.

on the left was a still pool of water, swamplike, filled with mosquitos and waterfowls and algae, waving grasses. on the right, a rushing violent sweep over the river over rocks, fuller, angrier, overpowering. i closed my eyes like my mother at synogogue.

i was in the middle of the river, between new jersey and pennsylvania. out of time, nowhere in particular.

i went swimming in the river by the dam on the first day of summer. my skirt floated up around my shoulders and my knees were battered and bruised against the rocks.

i sat quiet with friends at night in the summer heat, picknicked in the cold and rain, went by myself with notebook and pen. i first kissed dann there, the roar of the river quiet for once.

sacred place.