They say rapture is the feeling I am supposed to have for G-D.

I have had a close relationship with G-D since I was a child. I would look out the window of the car at the hills, I would escape Hebrew School classes to run outside and stand before the hillside beaming. I would love the world, and the world would love me. And I would feel G-D there beside me.

But I would not feel rapture.

We talk about G-D in my religion as though G-D were a lover. We deny ourselves sex and we try to force ourselves to love whoever we think we ought to. We were married off, for the longest time. Against our wills, or in ignorance of our wills. Us girls were married off early, before we had time to notice who we desired for themselves. Before we had time to learn desire, our desire was sold.

We fought our bodies to please our G-D, but really to please the fathers. The rabbis and our paternal fathers. We gave our desire and our sexuality into their hands and let them do with it as they wished.

And still, rapture existed. Still. So we told ourselves the rapture we felt was holy. Was divine. We called G-D “beloved.” We taught ourselves to believe the desire we felt was for reunion with the divine, not with our own bodies.

When I think of him now, I feel rapture. So kill me for this crime, if you wish. It is a crime against my community to feel what I do, and allow myself the feeling. It is a crime not to love who I am told to love. I let him go because the voices of all the fathers for millenia told me I had to do it. I let him go like a good little girl. But the feeling remains.

There is nothing to equal rapture. No big dick or big muscles or big degree or big paycheck. Rapture exists outside the things I have been taught to want. He taught me to want him. He taught me to want no one else.

I live in this world and each time I admire a quality in another woman that I do not possess, I think, that is why he would want her more than me. If he ever wanted me at all. I think, he would leave me for her. And that quality is why.

I have been a woman in this world for three decades already, and I am not sure I believe there is a man alive who would not prefer Margot Robbie to me. That no matter what I achieve or who I become, that would be true.

And still, I think of him. And there is this moment of the purest faith. My body is a song, and he is the person I have been singing to my whole life.

This feeling does not exist in Western culture’s story of what sex is. Of how women desire. Of how men attract a woman’s passion. Perhaps I really am crazy indeed. But I suspect instead that this story is simply inaccurate. And always has been.

Because you see, there is this feeling. And there is him. Shining at me.

There is me, shining behind my walls. Afraid to step out from behind them, but still. Behind my walls, I also am shining.