Free The Best American Essays 2014 by Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan

purple foam cubes, meditating in our jewel-toned leggings and tattoos?) is this: Isn’t there some human who can make me feel this way instead?
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    After I stopped believing in God, I would sometimes wake in a panic at being alone without supernatural support. So I memorized Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” to say to myself in the morning. When I woke with someone in my bed, I would recite it to him or her:
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               The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
               Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
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    Wilbur is talking about laundry dancing on a clothesline outside the window in the morning, white sheets and smocks that one mistakes for angels. It is because one wants to see the laundry as spiritual that “the soul shrinks
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From all that it is about to remember,
/
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
/
And cries,
/
‘Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry.’” Most people I recited the poem to found it a little melodramatic, but it calmed me down.
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    A few years ago I was living in a loft with a man and two cats and it started to happen again. In the morning, in the split second between sleep and waking, I would almost accidentally start to pray. I’d feel sunlight through the slits in the blinds, register that the alarm on my iPhone was going off, start hitting the bed and the windowsill and digging under myself to find it and tap its little snooze button. There were cats on either side of my head, and my human husband, to the right, was snoring hairily on his back, his hands curling and uncurling on his chest like the paws of a tickled kitten. But despite how many of us there were in the bed, I felt alone and too small to survive, too permeable, too disorganized, and trapped in something I didn’t have the words to describe. And something in me stretched up in a physical way toward the place where God used to be. I’d wake up and remember: there is no God. But I wanted to give up anyway, as if in doing so I could be rescued.
    There was a red armchair in the corner of the living room, and some days it was as far from the bed as I could get. The first few times I sat in the red chair it was just a comfortable place to think and cry. Then I would find myself in it for whole afternoons. I began to eye the chair, to tell myself not to sit in it. Then I’d tell myself I was just going to sit in it for a little bit. Then hours later the chair would still have me. The cats would sit a few feet from the chair and watch me warily—concerned, but mainly, I believed, judging me. One day when I left for work, I got only to the subway platform and turned back, and the second day, only to the street corner. I told the man about it, and the third day he walked me out and went down in the elevator with me and out the front door, but as soon as he was out of sight I snuck back upstairs to sit in the chair. I remember that for months I could not drive a car, but I cannot remember why I could not drive a car.
    I do remember the shape of the sentences that were running through my head while I was in the red chair, though not the words that were in them. They all went something like this: Is it this or that. Is it my job or my marriage. Is it my marriage or my mind. Is it him or is it me. It was him or me, him this or him that, and then always, But what if it’s me this, me that. The sentences were all made of impossible twos. Knowing that the dilemmas did not make sense only made it worse; there was not even the smallest movement of my mind I could trust.
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    It took several years to get out of the red chair, and to do it I had to leave the loft, the man, and the cats too. I moved into another loft and took very little furniture with me.