Vow

Vow is a story about how 20 years of the internet, including morally dubious relationships to older men as a young girl, age-inappropriate exposure to pornography, and online-only erotic trysts with men in adulthood, disordered my yearning for God-and how Catholicism helped me realize it. The chapbook opens with a vignette of a typical night at 12-years-old: online past my bedtime, waiting for a response from the man 10 years my senior who I fell into unrequited infatuation with, which lasted for almost two years. This relationship was one of, if not the, most foundational of my adolescence, and it was comprised of worship, devotion, and never-ending desire. I include writing on two recent online infatuation-ships that inexplicably captured my focus, to my detriment and despair. These storylines collide at Catholic spiritual retreat, in which a guided meditation leads to a painful epiphany about my childhood relationship to the internet, sexuality, childhood trauma and reaching for love and divinity.