My faith was given to me, but I loved it. It came in a ball wrapped up in smooth canvas. When I was young I could still bounce it, roll it around, and compare it with the ones my friends had. I liked to carry mine with me everywhere, because it would hum with this amazing energy and if I leaned in real close it would whisper things that made sense to me at the time.
When I grew up my ball started to become really heavy, and it didn’t work like it did before. I started to think it was sick. I noticed that some of the wisest people I knew had gone into a private place and taken the canvas cover off of their ball. They would talk about what it looked like in there and how best to keep your ball healthy. Sometimes there are things in there that aren’t so good, they said, but you can fix the stuff inside until it works perfectly again. I decided to try that for myself.
I found some place quiet and carefully pulled at the zipper that held the canvas cover together. It was really tight so it took a lot longer than I thought. After every inch of headway I made in the zipper I would stick my finger inside and rub it around. Whatever it was was dense and soft at the same time, and it made me excited to hurry along so I started tugging at the zipper even harder.
Eventually I made it all the way across the opening, peeled the canvas back, and dumped the insides onto the ground. It was this hard, shiny matter that looked at first like tiny threads of wire all balled up together, but when I picked it up I knew that wasn’t right. It was too soft. I plucked at one of the threads and when I managed to separate it a bit from the knotted mass, I immediately recognized what it was—hair. Human hair.
Where did this come from? How did it get to be so perfectly shaped? How did it hold together so well? I figured that all of those answers were inside somewhere, that if I separated everything like the gears of a watch I could figure out how it all worked and then put it back together better than it was before.
I teased apart the matted ball of hair until I could separate each individual follicle and investigate it. Some of them I liked, they felt like me. They matched what was in my head. Others felt foreign, like someone else's hair from someone else's head had gotten tangled up with mine over time. I threw those pieces out.
Yet still I was left with all of this hair. Most of it was mine, or at least looked like mine, but now nothing was holding it together anymore. I tried balling it back up again but I couldn’t get it to form a perfect sphere, it was constantly changing shape. Without all of the extra follicles there was room for each piece to wiggle around a little bit like they were trying to find a comfortable spot to lay down, but they wouldn't stop squirming.
The mass was bigger than it was before—when I tried to fit it back inside the cover there was always a tuft that would pop free or get caught in the zipper. And even when I managed to get it closed by taking a few more chunks out, they moved around inside so much that it was impossible to carry the thing around anymore. It hummed with a different energy, one that I didn’t recognize and made me feel upset.
Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe you weren’t supposed to pull it apart at all. Maybe you were supposed to just admire it from the outside.
When I took the ball out again it just fell apart in my hands. Each strand separated from the others and floated to the ground.
I arranged each strand in a neat stack and tied them together with string. I put it on a shelf in my bookcase next to a picture of my grandfather, a clay imprint of my dog’s paw, and other relics of things I once loved that are dead now.