Every day. Especially in the morning and the late, late night, I still talk to her.

She never answers. I’m pretty sure she never will.

I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife. I like to think I do, but it’s so damn hard to believe that. At least it is for me.

At my mother’s celebration of life in Hopewell on Sunday, I didn’t write a speech. I didn’t search for something on the internet. I just winged it.

It was rambling. But it was sincere.

I thought I was going to follow the preacher from the Episcopal church. I could only think, my story after that will be an interesting twist.

But a few went in between.

I got up to the microphone, took a swing of shitty IPA and started talking.

Eventually, I got up the nerve to talk about my mom and what she taught me. How to think. I could have just said, “My mom taught me to think for myself.” I could have walked away after that. I didn’t. I even ended it with some kind of “O’Doyle rules!” from Billy Madison moment with “My mom’s awesome.”

But anyway, back to my story from a shitty storyteller…

I was 9 or 10, sitting in that old church on Cedar Lane. Big red door. “Do all Episcopal churches have big red doors?” was a question from a lady in a bar a long, long time ago. I don’t remember what I was thinking. I’m sure I was staring at the dirty bibles that showed the signs of decades of dirty hands holding them and singing along to the songs or reading along with the verses.

Yuck.

Or maybe I was staring at the stained glass or the organ pipes (were there organ pipes??) or the wooden seats that are always too small for an adult and way too big for a kid in every damn church that has them. Not the modern ones, they’ve got movie theater seats!!

But anyways, I’m sitting in those bleacher seats and my mom is looking at me.

“You don’t want to be here, do you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I replied.

After the service, outside in the courtyard area where some of her ashes are now spread out (Wonder if it’s rained yet to wash them away? Wonder if the one person who stepped on them later has cleaned my mom off his shoes? Wonder. Wander. Wondering while wandering. Wandering while wondering.) she said to me simply… “If you can tell me a good reason you don’t have to come anymore.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

In the telling of the story on Sunday, I left that out. I said, “I won’t say the answer I gave, but it was very few words.”

And I didn’t go back to church anymore.

I like to think that set me on a path of always questioning things. Always thinking for myself.

It didn’t.

I was a member of the Young Republicans in high school. I drank Michelob and Coors Light and Milwaukee’s Best.

I never asked a girl out.

Another memory of mine that still bugs me to this day is walking up the stairs in our old high school. I hated walking the halls between classes. I’d see so many people I didn’t want to see. And so many that I did want to see but was too terrified to let them know. All of them female.

This day, an ugly girl, who if I knew any better already had dentures, but for some reason was popular with some people, ran smack into me on those stairs.

Usually, when walking in the hallways, I barely took a breath. I was scared my fast breathing would further cement my dork status (nothing was needed to enhance that).

I hustled up the stairs but heard voices. And I looked down at the stairs. Noe eye contact. No eye contact.

Boom! We brushed against each other. I looked up.

Dammit!

My eyes bugged out of my head as we made eye contact for a moment. I was paralyzed with fear. I could feel the fear.

She saw it. Smelled it even.

And just laughed at me.

I slumped down and walked to whatever room I was going to. I could hear the “oh my god, did you see his eyes?”

I slumped into my seat and put my head down. The same pose I made in first grade when we were playing 7 Up and I kept picking the girl I had a crush on. And she always knew. And she never picked me back.

Scared then, scared for years. Not so scared now.

Just dulled.

Better? Probably not.

Kind of like Cinderella’s “Push. Push.” I know what the song’s lyrics mean, but I always used it as a tool to motivate me to stop being scared. I wrote it once before. When another old crush found me somehow on the internet – and asked me to email her. I did. Hoping for that chance conversation to ask if she liked me too all those years ago. But I also wrote a blog entry about my hopes. And quoted Cinderella and pushing pushing.

I used to track IP addresses to see where people came from to read my stuff. I’d noticed someone different had been reading. Was it her?

Probably.

She never responded to my email.

Pushed it.