The catechism teacher assured us: our hearts would fill with the Holy Spirit, the first time we received the body of Christ. Rows of girls that Sunday—palms clasped together; bent heads with cloudy white veils. White dresses, white slips, white socks. Weeks of sticky fingers, gluing chads of felt along their scalloped edges—little circles of white, white, white. I looked around surreptitiously: was everyone else really having a moment, drowning in draughts of grace? Expectation is a problem when it doesn't come fulfilled. What you wait for, wish for, what arrives; what leaves or doesn't leave. What I remember, the first time I birthed a child: before it was even morning, I felt something give within me. A breach, a breaking, water that kept falling. Prone on the table, I looked up into a bright light suspended from the ceiling. I gasped with effort, and again when voices said She's here. Here where we are, in the bounded world, always looking for that light.
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