Chapter 1. Augusta.

I have never known church. Church is what the Christians and the Catholics do. Church is what is allegedly separated from the state. Church is the overarching metaphor for what it means to feel and see god. But I have known god. I have long felt some semblance of divinity scorching through my veins. I know I have a soul. I know I have felt the presence of the dead. I know that it was god—or G-d, as I like to call it—who had something to do with my making it back to Chicago from Philadelphia on a Sunday evening the day my brother was dying in a hospital bed.

My father taught me this when I was growing up: Question everything, Caroline, you can even question G-d. And somehow that token of necessity—that betrothal of my birthright into some hyper-intellectual expansiveness on the almighty Lord from the heavens above—made it a little bit easier for me to make it through my traumas. To push past suicidality. To want to try to live.

Here I am, standing in the parking lot of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, one of the oldest Black churches in America. This is the beginning of a three-month solo road trip around the United States of America in my silver S40 Volvo sedan. I have just spent six months in Atlanta working football season at a sports bar to save up money to fund this trip. I am 23. I am desperate to know America and self-righteously save the world. But perhaps, I am even more desperate to know and save myself. But I don’t fully know this yet. Right now, I only know that I’m hungry to experience something outside of the comfort of my upbringing, outside the rubric of a classroom, outside the barriers of the traumas that have previously made me want to die.

Six months prior, I sat my parents down on the couch in our TV-free sitting room, the second-floor landing pad port at the top of our two flights of stairs from which the tributaries of our bedrooms trailed: my parents’ bedroom, which traversed an entire length of the house with a hallway, bathroom, and two walk-in closets culminating in my mother’s home office above the garage; my younger sister Natalie’s seafoam green and periwinkle bedroom, which had been the guest room before she was born, and her bathroom in the hallway opposite the attic door; my younger brother Josh’s—dead by now—ocean blue carpeted bedroom with sports posters and paraphernalia lining the walls, and a tiny hallway with a bathroom opposite the upstairs laundry room; and my room—magenta pink carpet and pale yellow walls, which replaced the pale pink walls after I accidentally left a candle burning on a cardboard box while downstairs watching VH1’s “Behind the Music: Mötley Crüe” when I was 16. Our bedrooms: our sanctuaries. The sitting room: our Grand Central Station where we congregated in the evenings before bed.

I sat my parents down and I essentially said, I’m cutting myself off. They laughed because this is the kind of overdramatic shit I like to do: stage a ritual, stage a protest, stage a show. I didn’t think it was funny. I was serious as fuck. I was going to do this on my own. For the first time in my life. The whole point was to do this thing I wanted to do without anyone else’s help. They were like—okay, we weren’t planning on your not doing this on your own. But the thing is that when you’re born into privilege and wealth, it’s sort of like assumed that you’ll coast through life with the laurels of what you’ve been bequeathed. And having just graduated from an Ivy League school for which my parents paid full tuition for three of my four years (I’d learn later they’d taken out student loans for the entirety of my sophomore year, which I would ultimately pay back after graduate school with money I received from Josh’s death), and having spent my senior year and a postgraduate gap year at a boarding school in Switzerland, and having grown up traveling around the country and world and staying in fancy hotels, and having had jobs during the summers in high school and throughout college—four times a sleepaway camp counselor, once a clerk in the Eurodollar pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, many times a babysitter, once an office admin at my mother’s then brokerage firm—I never worked while in school. I’d never been financially independent before. I’d never needed to be. Until now.

I was carving out a declaration in order to make sure it was clear: I am moving to Atlanta to waitress at my friends’ sports bar and grille to fund my dream to drive across the United States. I am driving across the United States to write a book about feminism and social justice and how to save the world. I am writing a book about feminism and social justice and how to save the world because I want to be a writer and an activist and I am getting off the treadmill of expectations from my upbringing and fancy ass elitist Ivy League school and doing this shit on my own.

That was the gist of what I said. Because transparency builds consent. Of course, I didn’t know this in those terms yet. I just knew I had to make things crystal fucking clear. And so I did.

They would cover my car insurance. My health insurance was under their insurance because of my age. Since I didn’t yet receive my own credit card bills, I’d send my mother a check every month when I had any payments on the Mastercard credit card that was in my name. But I was on my own. For the first time in my life. I was cutting myself off from more than just them.

I change out of my light grey New Balance sneakers, my hand grasping the edge of my open trunk, which I’ve organized to be my closet for the impending months (in a few weeks, I’ll drop off half of my belongings from Atlanta in Chicago before heading west on Route 66). I slip on a pair of black leather ballet shoes from the GAP. The elastic hugs my pale skin. An Atlanta poet had called me taupe when I’d attended her weekly open mic on Mondays. I’m olive when tan.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon. March 6, 2007. I’m here because Dr. Lawrence Carter, the Dean of the Martin Luther King International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta, told me I had to come. I met Dean Carter because my dad knew Walter Massey—then President of Morehouse, an historically Black and historically all-male liberal arts college—from when Massey had been Dean at Brown University, where my dad went to undergrad. In very typical Steven Rothstein (my dad) fashion, once I’m living in Atlanta, he’s like—you need to meet Walter Massey and go by Morehouse. My dad arranges for me to go by Morehouse and meet Walter Massey. And sitting there in Massey’s office, I give my elevator pitch: I’m living in Atlanta to save up money for a solo road trip around the United States and I want to learn more about social justice and the history of Civil Rights and build off of the activism I did in college to help change the world.

There are two main takeaways from my meeting with Massey: First, he invites me that Friday to the annual Morehouse/Spelman Colleges Christmas Carole Concert, beginning with a pre-concert reception at then Spelman College President Beverly Tatum’s house (I spend the reception sitting with Tatum’s husband talking about and deconstructing gender); and second, he tells me I need to meet Dean Carter, calls his secretary, and sets an appointment for us to meet.

I meet Carter a week and a half after the concert. I explain that I want to better understand how to approach activism and social justice and change. As a scholar on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Daisaku Ikeda, Carter gives me a stack of pamphlets and print outs on non-violent actions and strategies. He also gives me a list of books and articles to read. People to find. Places to go along my journey ahead. Namely Springfield Baptist Church and the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles when I get to California in a few months.

me: he’s the ULTIMATE scholar for me to meet in terms of my personal approach to activism

This is what I tell my friend Megan—from college—over GChat the night before meeting Carter.

me: i can’t believe how much this is all aligning!
me: besheret like WHOA

Beshert is the Yiddish word for destiny. We most often use it—we, being Jews, and not just Ashkenazi Jews, since Yiddish is an historically Ashkenazi language, but like Jews diasporically at large—to refer to a romantic partnership. Like—holy shit I think I met my beshert—after a first date. Or like, standing up at the chuppah during a wedding ceremony and looking into your beloved’s eyes and being like—you’re my beshert. But it’s bigger than romance. It’s personal destiny. Purpose. Raison d’être—reason for being—as the French would say. Aka, fate. Etc.

Megan: it’s so great
Megan: is it weird to go back and forth from that sort of stuff and work?
me: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
me: wow…i can’t believe you just asked that!!!!
me: yes yes yes yes yes it’s so strange
Megan: yeah i would imagine
me: but in a way, i’ve been doing it my whole life
Megan: living activism and then studying it
Megan: hearing it from the academic side versus viewing it
Megan: i guess that is your thing—you have experienced so much of your activism

My activism.

As a kid, I knew this: world peace was possible. At 8 years old, I stood in the middle of my pink-carpeted bedroom in a floor-length pink tutu with my Sony tape recorder. Gripping the microphone in my left hand, I swayed from left to right singing a song I wrote: It’s a word I’ve always loved, and I still do. / Though the meaning never changed, it just came, and went away. And the chorus: P-E-A-C-E / Peace, the hope of our future / P-E-A-C-E / Peace, for you and me.

But I grew up in the affluent, mostly white northern suburbs of Chicago. Privilege City. My early activism expressed itself as philanthropy and giving to various charities, or volunteering to make balloon animals at events and fundraisers for children with terminal illnesses. Other times I was outspoken and loud about sexism, war, violence, homophobia, and racism in classes at school, or socially with friends, or pushed boundaries on stage as a theater kid and in my poetry and nonfiction writing. I got involved with eating disorder awareness advocacy and spoke publicly about my own mental health challenges, and outwardly championed LGBTQIA+ rights.

I was still an asshole. All too often I both led or joined my peers in making fun of less affluent or extravagant towns. I may have had a heart towards liberty and justice for all, but until college, I lacked the infrastructure to have an intersectional and anti-oppression analysis of identity.

Still, I was pulled to activism and social change early. When I was seven, in November 1990, the week my sister Natalie was born, my father took me to see Berkeley in the Sixties, an academy award-nominated documentary about the beginnings of the Free Speech Movement and previously unparalleled student protests at the University of California, Berkeley, that helped shape 1960s counterculture both on campus and beyond. Here I was, a white Jewish kid who had moved from a well-groomed apartment building near Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago where I spent my first four years of life, to a well-groomed suburb after Josh was born, being exposed—at seven and a half—to archival footage of Mario Savio, Joan Baez, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panthers, and a slew of Berkeley college students who learned how to go limp when the cops came and arrested them during building sit-ins and on-campus protests.

I took this to mean one thing: being American meant protesting for equity and liberation for all.

I also remember the first time my mother explained queerness to me (though this was in the late 1980s, before the word queer had been reclaimed as a part of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella). We were at the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament in California, as the late movie star Dinah Shore had used her fame to up the notoriety of women’s professional golf, thus creating the tournament—now known as the ANA Inspiration—in her name. And so—at least at the time—the tournament was a magnet for women, especially lesbian and queer women. We were at the tournament, and a couple—both women—stopped to hand us something we had dropped. I can’t remember exactly. But I can see the women in my mind—a memory of the two of them side by side—and then my mother leaning down and explaining to me they were a couple and that was normal and ok.

Both she and my father had gay cousins, two of whom—one of each of theirs—had died of AIDS. I can remember sitting with my father in my bedroom at the vacation home we had in Palm Springs, as he told me about his cousin, Martin, who had come out to him over drinks when they were young adults. He had a partner who was a flight attendant from Europe. Martin was an earlier AIDS case when the crisis and epidemic first took hold and he soon died.

These conversations both happened before I was 10 years old, so these moments became my lens on the world. Protest meant patriotism; and queerness was normal. And being a Jew meant I was allowed to question everything, like my father had said. Even G-d. But let me still be extremely clear: it’s not like I grew up in some overtly, radically leftist, progressive, hippie-esque home.

I was raised with an egalitarian consciousness while still living with and amongst great wealth. It was a unique juxtaposition. Dichotomy. Paradox at its best. At some point in my childhood, after relinquishing his devotion to only owning and driving Volvos, my father purchased a black BMW sedan. We’d drive around the suburbs while he blasted his favorite music on high.

The staples on his mixtapes almost usually included Todd Rundgren’s “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” The Happening’s “See You in September,” The Turtle’s “Happy Together,” Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra’s separate renditions of “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and more. He’d play the mixes to death. Like there wasn’t any other music on earth. He’d get weepy with nostalgia. And every time, he’d ask if we knew the songs. Like we didn’t just do this last week.

And then there was this: Country Joe and the Fish’s “Fixin’ To Die Rag” from Woodstock, which opened with “The Fish Cheer.” So here we were—Josh, Natalie, and me—three little white American Jewish kids in the back of a luxury German car singing anti-war songs and swearing as we drove through the affluent Chicago suburbs with our extremely nostalgic dad.

Give me an “f.”

“F.”

Give me a “u.” 

“U.”

Give me a “c.”

“C.”

Give me a “k.”

“K.”

“What’s that spell?”

“Fuck!”

What’s that spell?

“Fuck!” 

And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for
don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates
ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee we’re all gonna die

My activism. My lens. My fetishization for protest and my intimate fantasies for world peace became my lived experiences once I began to understand the ways in which I was both an oppressor and the oppressed. At boarding school in Switzerland, I began sharing my story and experiences with my eating disorder, self-harm, depression, and anxiety, and so I became an eating disorder recovery advocate and body empowerment activist. As a survivor of multiple accounts of sexual assault, having been sexually assaulted for a year and a half by a peer in high school and raped my first month of college by a stranger on my dorm room floor, I got involved with The Vagina Monologues and V-Day campaign, cast in the show my first and second years, then taking on roles as producer and organizer my third and fourth years, and so too I became an outspoken survivor and activist for sexual assault and violence prevention and advocate for consent. When the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars took hold, I got engaged with anti-war protests and marches and rallies and work. I also joined groups on campus dedicated to racial equity and antiracism. And others focused on gender equity and queer rights. And then of course, as a spoken word poet, I was constantly speaking truth to power about all the things. My activism. My activisms. These were my rallies. My marches. My protests. My thirst for equity and change.

And now, thanks to Dean Carter, scholar on movements for liberation and justice and non-violent action and change, I am standing in the parking lot of Springfield Baptist Church. I called last week to say I’d be driving in from Atlanta at the behest of Dean Carter at Morehouse. The church’s secretary, Carolyn, told me the pastor would need to be there, so he’d be coming in.

I walk into the church, the first Baptist Church in the United States organized by Black Americans in 1787. Reverend E.T. Martin, now the pastor for 36 years, brings me into his office. He settles his torso into his chair. I take a seat on the other side of the desk, facing him.

The wall behind and above him: A newspaper article with the headline: “U.S. Negro Community Mourns JFK.” A fly catcher. A framed photo of his wife Betty. A photo of E.T. himself. An intercom. A clock. Three pictures stapled to a piece of cardboard. A document stating the founding of Morehouse College in 1867, as Morehouse founder William Jefferson White had been a member here, baptized here at Springfield on October 7, 1855, exactly 147 years to the day before my brother Josh died in 2002, after being hit by a car on a sidewalk the day before.

I take out a Docket brand notepad, the ringed binding at the top. The pages are white, blue lines, and red left margins. No holes, said for the perforation at the top. I take notes in black pen. My perfect penmanship I’ve been carefully crafting and curating since second grade. Perhaps—said for my thick eyebrows that I no longer overpluck—my handwriting is my favorite trait.

I am exactly two years shy from receiving an acceptance to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where I will graduate in May 2010 with a Master of Science degree. I do not yet call myself a journalist, let alone an aspiring one. Though I did spend the second semester of my senior year of college writing a 44-page longform nonfiction documentary piece—essentially a feature article—about a Hooters restaurant in Maple Shade, New Jersey, for which I kept notepads and notebooks and took copious notes to yield the final document I turned into my veteran journalist and author professor. I have been a notetaker all my life. At this point—day one of my road trip and the strangers I will talk to and meet, the experiences I will soak into my soul—my plan is to turn this into a book. I am—for all intents and purposes—at this juncture in the plot, most certainly reporting, most certainly taking notes. This here is page one.

The first thing I write under the date and that this is a meeting with “Rev Martin @ Springfield Baptist Church” is a bulleted dot with “5 yrs: celebrate Morehouse’s Anniversary here” and then a small arrow at the left margin pointing to “in charge of worship for that day.”

Worship. Worship. What is it to worship? What does it mean to worship? Who do we worship? Why do we worship? And how? At this point, right now in Reverend Emmett Thomas Martin’s office at Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, in March 2007, I’m not really sure that I feel I worship anything. I mean, I believe in some semblance of divinity, and I feel it has something to do with synchronicity, and I definitely believe in reincarnation, and I also sometimes feel the presence of my dead brother and dead best friend Kat, who died six months before Josh. But do I worship G-d? Do I worship the version of G-d that I’d been taught in Hebrew school and synagogue? Do I worship some version of divine consciousness that’s closer to the energy-channeled bi-monthly newsletters my mother sends me from her dear friend, who is a soul memory healer and practitioner in Southern California, who talks about the consciousness shifts happening on the planet now and ahead? Do I worship anything at all?

Or maybe, do I worship writing? Do I worship justice? Do I worship my fervent desire for equity and my current belief that I might myself have something to do with helping the planet get there? And does that mean I worship the systems that might allow me to think myself a kind of god?

He—Reverend Emmett Thomas Martin—tells me we live in an informal age, which makes me grateful I changed my shoes in the parking lot. He says when you fight young people’s desire to wear jeans and T-Shirts to worship at church, you lose them. Which means to E.T., worship is a thing that might have previously required formality, but now simply requires being accessible.

E.T. has a thick face, thick eyes, thick hands. A wrinkle on his forehead for every decade in the ministry. He wears a silk white button-down shirt and a tie. His voice is slow; his patient cadence is—perhaps like the heavens themselves—awesome. Perhaps it all whispers: I know church.

E.T., who often refers to himself in the third person, tells me that he thinks the major problems in America today start at home. Start with the downhill shift of parents losing authority over their children. Guidance begins at home, and it isn’t happening anymore, he says, and that it keeps getting “worse.” “Americans have asked TV to do what they’re supposed to do in the home.”

He says TV, television because it’s 2007. The Internet barely exists. But it is nothing yet like it will become. Facebook is mostly still for college and high school elite; Twitter is relatively obscure; YouTube has only existed for a year; Instagram and SnapChat won’t each launch for another three and four years alike; MySpace will soon die; TikTok is 10 years from launch, and a baker’s dozen 13 years from reaching over two billion mobile downloads around the world.

But this shift—TV—has changed church, he says. Says people expect their church to give them everything these days. Like recently, several members wanted the church to take the kids to Six Flags Great America. “Church is a place where people come to be taught about god,” he says. But with new things emerging such as grants, people are now not always ministered properly. “Young people are more geared to the Pentecostal style of worship,” he says. “They like to move around and become active…Televangelize…Young folk want to hear how to be themselves.”

I think that’s why I’m on this trip. Of course, I can only say that now all these years later looking back. I think I think America is going to tell me how to be myself. I don’t yet realize it’ll be me. For instance, on Monday, January 29, 2007, at 3:21 a.m., after attending a poetry and hip hop open mic in downtown Atlanta, I had emailed my best friend Chloe in a fit of desperation to encapsulate the stirring that was starting to—or perhaps had always been—brewing in my soul. I was going to figure out how to save America. But by now, underneath it all, maybe I was inching towards admitting and accepting that what I needed to save was myself. I was—for the first time—without stability. In the middle of the night, in a verbal fit, I poured it out of my hands:

I can’t think back to a time—amidst the grief and loss, amidst the bulimia, amidst the traumatic stress of rape and sexual abuse—where I felt like this. This is the most pure sadness and stress I have ever felt in my life. I am not covering it up by overeating. I am not covering it up by starving. I am not covering it up by binging and purging. I am not covering it up by working too hard academically. I am not covering it up by overwhelming myself with too many extracurricular activities, over-exercising, over-sleeping, or hitting any extreme whatsoever. I am purely resting and sitting in the realm of something I can’t quite put my finger on. I cannot articulate this mind state, this emotional state, this spiritual state. All I know is that it is pure.

I am beyond out of my comfort zone. I have beyond succeeded in my mission to be someone else. It’s like I asked the universe to teach me about the world from someone else’s shoes and I’ve tied up the laces to these shoes of some other person that I don’t really know and I don’t know how to tap my ruby red slippers and find my way home back to Kansas. And I get it. I can never be someone else. I guess I just went too far from home and I’m homesick. And this isn’t like I miss my bed with pink carpet. I miss my world, my realm of existence. I don’t know how to say it any better than this but I think I miss upper-middle class, intellectual, artsy, liberal, Jewish, Northern society. I think that’s maybe it. I went too far into Oz. I went too far down the yellow brick road and I just want to go home. I never left home by going to boarding school in Switzerland. I never left home by going to Penn. I never left home by going to sleepaway camp in Maine. I always stayed. I was close to what I knew. I know I’m not at “home” because a part of myself is vacant. A part of my natural environment, the one where I feel whole, is missing. And I know that I should be able to be “whole” wherever I am in the world, because home is really within myself and my body. And maybe that’s what I’ll figure out how to do on my road trip. Maybe when I’m moving, I’ll find stability within myself. But here, not moving, I am running around inside and I can’t figure out where I went.

I miss the world from whence I came. It is not that I don’t like the real world. I was always in the real world. I was in my real world. I feel like I came to another land that is really foreign to my home. I think that if this road trip is going to be a success, I have to go as myself. I have to go as Caroline Rothstein—upper-middle class Jewish Ivy League graduate female who saved up some money to trek around the United States in her Volvo. I think I have to abandon the bullshit story and thesis that I’m trying to figure out what is going on in America before I do anything about it. I think that’s a load of crap. I’m just traveling. I’m just trying to hang out with myself for a few months and check some shit out…go out of my comfort zone and live a life of spontaneity rather than structure. I know what’s going on in America. I don’t need to travel around in my Volvo to find the glimmering light of eureka on how to save the world. It’s all a microcosm of a macrocosm and I get what’s going on. I already know. Maybe I have to prove that to myself. Maybe I have to make sure I’m right. Do the archeological dig so I have some fossil evidence to support the hypothesis and written theory. Find Atlantis to know that Plato was right. Or find nothing to know that like Socrates, I know nothing.

I’m digging deep. That’s what I do. I’m a classicist. I dig for shit. I pick apart Latin to figure out what Vergil’s trying to tell us. To figure out what Vergil knew. Maybe I’m picking apart myself. Taking my own text of theory and knowledge and understanding and testing to make sure that it translate…making sure that I can translate everything I see into my own language and vice versa…translate everything I already know into everything I will learn about. Whatever I thought I was driving for, isn’t really what I’m driving for. But I need to drive. I need to get in my car because I have never been so scared in my life, and this is some fear I must face. I am afraid to be without structure. I am afraid that I will freak out and end up shaking in a bathroom stall at a roadside stop in Arkansas because I haven’t planned out the upcoming week. What will I do with all my choices? I have spent the past five months learning that my greatest privilege in life is that I have choices. That I can choose to do anything that I want in my life. Any occupation, career path, future I want to make for myself. And here I stand about to embark upon a journey that is exercising the most choices I will ever freely implement in my entire life. Perhaps I am afraid of the privilege that stands before me. Perhaps I feel like I don’t deserve it. Perhaps I am afraid I will misuse it and never again have the opportunity to get it “right.” Before me, stands months of choice. Pure choice. No obligations. No job. No deadline. I can do whatever the fuck I want. I am a single woman with a car in the United States of America. And for the first time in my life, I face pure privilege: freedom and choice.

Love always,
Care

But for now, sitting here in E.T.’s office, I—like his congregants—still want to be told how to be myself on the outside. I want answers for what or who or how I have to be to help push this country towards universal choice. I’ve only got the tiniest bits of planted seeds that I’m going to need to surrender to choosing myself. That somehow that kind of worship is part of the math.

I ask E.T. if his job is more exhausting than it used to be.

“Lord, yes!” he bemoans. “The road changed somewhere.” That’s what I want: a changing road.

He offers me a Diet Pepsi. Then some of his McDonald’s hamburger and homemade strawberry cake from the secretary Carolyn. While I decline the food, I gratefully accept the soda.

“A Black man fairs better in the South,” he tells me. “We’ve come a long way in the eyes of the media.” And yet, he says that for the average Black person, “no progress has really been made.”

And so to solve it, I ask?

“Money will be the answer,” he says. “But there needs to be some compensation for the years we worked for free. It’s about people being heard,” which he repeats, “People being heard. Powers that be always in control, the rich get richer. Up minimum wage, up prices. When something is wrong from the onset, it’s eternally wrong. Won’t reach a crest, but always retain honor, dignity, and prestige. Leroy Johnson, the first Black senator of Georgia, said, ‘America, in spite of all of her inadequacies, is still the best country in which to live.’”

We talk for three and a half hours, after which he tells me this has been one of the most interesting interviews of his entire life. Before I leave, Carolyn gives me a tour and a copy of the book Old Springfield by Edward Chasin—which Dean Carter had said I had to read—and E.T. tells me, “People say, 11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in the week.”

And I’ll wonder what that segregation is. At that moment, I’ll think it’s about race, maybe class, maybe religion and organized and institutional faith. But by the time I get to California, by the time I make it to the other recommendation on Dean Carter’s list, I’ll know it’s about church. Not the church I have never known. But the kind of church that asks for an assembling of sorts.

Because the word church with its many etymologies and roots gets translated from the Greek work ekklesia in the New Testament, which means “a called-out assembly” or a “congregation.” And it’s specifically with regards to being called out by god. And so perhaps the church I will come to know is a congregation of my many selves, and what they have to do with the divine.

But now—on March 6—I drive back to Atlanta. Stay with my friend Eric in his spare bedroom. Eat dinner at the Mellow Mushroom—a pizza chain with a commodified hippie vibe. I get up early. Leave Atlanta at 8:45 a.m. on March 7, finally—after months of waiting—heading west.

I cross the Alabama state line at 9:40 a.m. Eastern. My cellphone changes to 8:41 a.m. Central. Somehow, it feels like an accomplishment. Like out here on the empty roads with a muggy fog sifting into the cool, crisp morning air, I am entering another world. It’s like the curtains are opening, or closing—depends on how desperately I want to shape the metaphor—and I am awakening to a particularly new kind of dawn. Which will meet a particularly new kind of dusk. I am here in Alabama, for the first time in my entire life, and something is either starting or ending, I’m just not sure what. Either way, it’s undeniable. I can feel it in my hungry chest: some transition is taking place. This is where I begin, gutting myself open, from the inside out.