You Don’t Look a Thing Like Jesus
diary entries of a Ukrainian-American girl who's boyfriend becomes a born-again Christian
this is a fictional piece written by Livvy Winkelman
January 3rd— My boyfriend goes to church for the first time in his life. I stay home, getting outrageously high and applying to colleges I could never afford, with or without a scholarship. He calls me after the service to tell me he’s picking up condoms on his way to my house. We’re going to be finishing up applications together. He shows up at my door with a pocket bible he bought at the gas station and no condoms.
January 17th— My older sister starts talking to my boyfriend about god. It’s finally something they have in common. My mother, who spent the last four years hating him, wishing I would break up with him, teaches him how to pray the rosary and my boyfriend ignores that it’s not the kind of Christian he is, because the pink pearly beads of my mother’s most favorite rosary fascinate him. He tells me I would look so pretty in that color.
February 4th— One month after his first church service, my boyfriend is baptized in a giant above-ground pool his church bought from K-Mart twenty years ago. He is being reborn in a chlorinated womb only two years older than him. He has taught himself how to die, and I have recorded the whole thing.
February 14th— We don’t have sex. Instead, he takes me to bible study. I spend the whole three hours pretending I was not raised Catholic, pretending I believe in god, pretending I recognize the guy sitting next to me, who refused to touch me after we entered the stale, fluorescent lit room. No one believes me.
March 1st— My boyfriend has signed up to do a mission through his church. If he is selected, he will go with a group of dedicated Christians to help rebuild the communities of Guatemala and teach indigenous peoples about the wonders of a non-denominational Christian god. I can’t look into his eyes anymore because they’ve changed. I try to tell him about the Protestant ministers in Ukraine, the ones who tried to convert my grandparents. They’d already converted once in their lives. He tells me that it’s different because we were all Christians. I try to tell him about the scars on my mother’s wrist and 1980’s Kyiv. He shows me the mission brochure and tells me if he gets selected, he’ll send me as many postcards he can, because he knows I like to stick them on my wall.
August 28th— My best friend turns twenty-one, and my boyfriend tells me he has given up alcohol for good. Spends half the party preaching to people he’s known since kindergarten and doesn’t notice when they roll their eyes because the couch is his pulpit and the small house party his congregation. It’s been five months of bible study every other night. Five months without him kissing me, but still introducing me to his fellow people of god as his girlfriend. I’m almost surprised when he starts speaking in tongues. After the party is over, I sneak out the back and call my grandmother from my cell phone. I pretend to understand her, and she pretends not to care. It’s almost something. Inside, I hear my boyfriend celebrating because he’s officially been selected to go on the mission trip. He’s filling the spot of a woman who has just discovered she’s pregnant. The woman is not married. I tell my grandmother I think I will never marry, and I think she understands me. Language stopped mattering to us a long time ago.
September 10th— I can’t remember the last time my boyfriend and I had sex. I remember, after he decided he wanted to learn god in the same way he learned to love me, that I had to swallow my own bile before he fucked me and pretend that god lived there in my mouth. That his tongue was lapping against some unknown part of our creator when we kissed. Because maybe all this would be easier this way, with someone in the middle. Someone calling him home and sending me back.
September 11th— My boyfriend spends the whole day getting everything in order, because he leaves on mission in early October and his mother can’t find his passport. I spend the whole day on his bed, sleeping and not sleeping and looking up people that were in my catechism class on Facebook. One of them is already a mother, and the rest are pretending god never existed. My boyfriend walks into the room and tells me that we should break up the day before he leaves and spend the next couple weeks unlearning each other so we can let go and allow god into our hearts. I send every single person I went to catechism with a friend request and leave early to help my mom make golubtsi.
September 30th— At my boyfriend’s farewell party, I kiss someone else. Someone we’ve both known since before we were together, and this someone feels more guilty than I do. We spend the whole party locked in one of my boyfriend’s parents’ five bathrooms, sitting in the bathtub face to face. He found me hiding in there and played dumb. I tell him about my mother’s childhood in Kyiv, when Ukraine was home to the second largest Evangelical community in the world, after the United States. I tell him this, and he comes in and locks the door when I ask. I tell him about how Ukraine was home to half of all Pentecostals in the entirety of the Soviet Union. I tell him about the divorce between the Eastern Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, and how my grandparents needed to make a choice. He tells me my hands are pretty, that he always liked my hair, and that his grandmother’s name was Inna. Somewhere, a firecracker goes off. Thunder. His lips are warm.
eerily beautiful - thanks so much for sharing this. there are so many things left unspoken here, so all I’ll say is that this makes a lot of sense to me. it’s a skill to make something that took a lot of effort seem effortless anyway, I think you have that skill
Livvy thee legend!!!! 🫶🏾🫶🏾 Such a beautiful piece ❤️