Just Believe, Just Believe, Just Believe

A long stretch of November days unfolds in fragments — coffee, cold air, chapel, work, letters, interviews, apples, snow, and the constant ache of missing the people who once formed the center of her life. The Felonist drifts in and out of herself, writing in bursts, disassociating in between, trying to stay upright inside a place that feels both pointless and punishing. She forgives everyone she can name, even the ones who broke her. She meets with the Chaplain, remembers the rape at Rikers, and feels something shift. Packages arrive, small comforts in a world of half light and arbitrary rules. Grace cries on the phone. Bill sends turtlenecks. Women come and go — Jen, Franny, Carrie, Walker — each carrying her own trauma story, her own unraveling. She reads obsessively: Lamott, Rohr, Julian of Norwich, the nonsense of The Hunting of the Snark. She pulls Tarot cards, prays for signs, for clarity, for a way through the bankruptcy, the marriage, the future she can’t yet see. She rakes leaves and cries. She dreams of Ireland. She wonders if she has been thrown away like rubbish. She tries to understand the IRS man’s strange kindness. She tries to understand herself. And through all of it — the snow, the sorrow, the synchronicities, the spiritual wrestling, the endless shoveling — one refrain keeps rising to the surface, the only instruction she can hold onto: just believe, just believe, just believe.