Nothing will make you believe in God more than running through an airport unavoidably late for a flight.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you and He (She? Doubt it) are in a complicated relationship at the moment. All of a sudden Bible verses on faith and fortitude will come rushing back at you with the same speed as the sweat dripping down your back. You’ll stand in line playing Jesus, hoping for a miracle at immigration because goddamit – oops! – the line is too fucking long!

You’ll hit rock bottom when all your pleas for help from the stone-faced CDG Information officials (information? More like the exact opposite of assistance) meet with…well, stone, and you’re treated like a normal person with an icky foreign passport. You’ll switch your prayers to the gods of capitalism, wishing you had done a degree that made you much richer so that you could bypass the line or buy alternate citizenship like a certain Libyan president.

You’ll start counting how many seconds each person is spending at the immigration counters, and compare which one is going faster. You’ll pity the poor, suffering soul who thinks the aforementioned officials are on his side. Even as you notice and hope for the line with the handsome black Frenchman, you know good and well that you’re using his face as a distraction from the rising and completely unchristian panic rising up within you, threatening to submerge you and your now tapping foot. You’ll start singing songs to avoid thinking bad thoughts – thoughts like, if I miss this flight, I don’t have money to pay for a hotel somewhere (also unavoidable – all your money and salaries and adjacent sources of income have been gathered together for survival. Because Egypt Air lost your bag and you’ve been in France for a week, surviving on your cousins’ deras and patriarchy) and I don’t want to call my siblings again to rescue me on yet another foreign trip even though really, like, what are siblings EVEN FOR; thoughts like that call karma and fate your way and you need a little less karma right now and a little more organized religion (one could argue that they’re close to the same thing).

You’ll make the flight, thanking, you know, God, that Egypt Air is as efficient with baggage as it is punctual. You’ll start writing this post in your head as you wait to board the aircraft, thinking of those strange and acute surges of belief that pass like contractions and remind you how small and insignificant you are in the larger scheme of things; how you really need to go back to therapy for better coping mechanisms; and how adulthood just feels like a series of rolling with heavier and heavier punches until you die. You’ll sit down and start reading a Brandon Sanderson lovingly loaned to you to try and calm the storm in your mind, and think, wa. By the way acha niende home.