Interview with a Vampire: interfaith, international, in touch with her feelings
when your first date is at an Alpha Jesus meeting
Kayra grew up on the Mediterranean sea. After months away at school in Canada, she would go straight from the Izmir Adnan Menderes airport to her best friend Alice’s house, down a glass of baking soda and water to settle her stomach, and break it down until sunrise at a beach-front club smelling of sea salt and cigarettes. She falls in lust with fishing boat captains and young English teachers and adds tiny tattoos to the dainty collection on her ankles. Her circles are hot, secular, completely bilingual. Laser hair removal. Fresh dates and tomatoes.
In Montreal, Kayra shuffles around a sublet with shiny, sloping floors of thickly cut wood in red crocs and an old sweater. It’s getting colder and the heater is broken.
“I swear the temperature in this apartment is giving me a headache. It’s making me fucking sick,” she’s annoyed. In a neat plastic box in her bureau she keeps generic but powerful antibiotics and ointments stamped with Turkish umlauts and crescent moon accents, promising relief from the consequences of weather extremes. Similar boxes contain a dark rainbow of nail polish, gold chains and amulets, glittery and stretchy halter tops. Downstairs, a corporate-issue laptop drones on from the corner table where it stays open during the 9:00-5:00 EST workday.
Kayra got a remote job straight out of college at a very prominent international bank as a data analyst. McGill STEM degree, large company employment salary, Canadian permanent residence status, passport, freedom. Job is boring, hasn’t been home in two years, skin is pale and irritated. The neighbor’s black cat slinks in and out through the back porch. Make soup. Make tea. Skincare routine. Read about self-improvement. Look at pictures of boys she still thinks about. The socially awkward yet arrogant pseudo-intellectual, jawline, glasses, barbed and charming texts that basically stomped on her heart. She couldn’t even really complain because all her friends said I told you so. She hovers over a photo of him on someone else’s profile, tan and ripped on a beach in France with a surfboard propped in the white sand. He doesn’t have any pictures of his own. Prick.
Then there’s the best friend from home who turned out to be really good in bed, or at least the backseat of his car. They fantasize about going to Paris together. In Turkish, no nuance is lost. Her phone wallpaper is a picture he took in a church in Germany: Jesus on the cross, the angle serving a dramatic juxtaposition with an intricately sweeping ceiling. She puts her phone down. She’s trying to read more books anyway. About love, power, art, ancient forces. Stuff that takes her far away from forwarding excel sheets to a PC in a brutalist highrise in downtown Toronto.
Or the grey routine of traipsing to the discount grocery store to buy the same products week after week. Canned chickpeas. Produce that doesn’t taste like anything. Yogurt. Never snacks or booze, which is what I bought when I lived alone. She’s walking back from the store with a totebag full of underwhelm. Narrow dark sunglasses on, one earbud dangling down the lapel of a stained puffer jacket she borrowed from someone and never returned. Directly across from her three-story building is an adorable duplex with a Juliet balcony. Boys live there, she sees them through her living room window. They seem jovial and drink red wine out of stemmed glasses which is, tragically, a rarity in this demographic. One of them is on the balcony as she rounds the corner of their block. Dark hair. Fuck. He’s cute.
“Heyyy,” he says with recognition as she lassos her keys from her bag. Fuck. He’s handsome as shit (as she later describes). He invites her over, for pancakes with his roommates. Love thy neighbor and such. They are three Canadian guys, graduated, NORMAL, chatty. Andrew is blonde and hockey-infected. Ben is gawky and goofy. Zach is, I mean, she’s obsessed.
They go to a perfume store together, as olfactory appreciation was identified as a common interest. He sniffs samples off her wrist and listens intently to the employee’s descriptions of musk. He works from home as well, his own accounting solutions company. So she brings her laptop over and they alternate between charged silences of feigned productivity and flirting.
“Do you want free food?” he clamshells his laptop. He has a sleepy expression in his eyes that contributes to the overwhelming gentleness of his being. Banquet gratuit, at a beautiful church with the boy she likes, of course. She’s always felt comfortable in churches, around religion. Turkey is replete with the temples of multiple religions that speak to its legacy as an intensely historical metropolis: ancient ruins predating Stonehenge by thousands of years, carefully preserved heritage sites in the heart of cities that changed faith allegiances, and monuments to the big three – Islam, Christianity, Judaism – that reflect the unique centuries of religious coexistion within the country. Kayra likes these for their beauty and rumblings of ancient mysticism, she finds a calmness in lighting candles in the hallowed halls.
“If I was a believer, I would be a Catholic, since I was little I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals, the heaviness, the drama. In general I like the esoteric, the mysterious things.”
Religion’s ~vibes~ feed that magical mystical area for Kayra. She thinks that going to a kindergarten that was run by Italian Catholic nuns imprinted this awareness of ritual without faith upon her at a young age. But on top of the milieu of iconography and relics that exists in her home country, it is hard to be under the Turkish government and not pay attention to religion.
Despite a population overtly identifying as Muslim (99% according to a 2021 survey), the Turkish state functions to uphold assertive secularism as enshrined in the constitution. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the country saw an intense secularization of schools and limitations of visible religion to the private spheres of home and conscience. Modernization and Westernization reforms have further led Turkey to be relatively relaxed and moderate in terms of religion compared to other countries with a majority Muslim population. The current conservative government has adopted a more passive form of secularism that affords Islamic religiosity more visibility in the public sphere, but Turkey still claims a tolerance towards all religions and status as a secular country.
Kayra’s father believes the conservative shift has caused his country to fall into shambles due to the rising Islamic tides within the government and population, yet he believes in “God”. Her mother does as well, though her realization of such a figure is more in the form of energy, affirmations, and Reiki practice. Since she was a baby, Kayra’s maternal grandmother has included her in the five daily prayers she recites, in Turkish not Arabic.
“My background is pretty unique in Turkey. I grew up freely. In middle school, my dad told me I could pick my own cards. Recently he said I’ve taken it too far by essentially becoming an atheist,” she sighs. In the background, I can hear the rising tempo of “Love Tonight” by Shouse. She’s calling me from a beach club in Cancun. Exodus from Canada, rapture at the all-inclusive.
“I wouldn’t say that’s true though, because I do believe in something. I guess some people call it God, Buddha, flow – for me it’s just a driving power in the universe that I can’t answer questions without.” The bass drops in the song. All I need / is your love / tonight.
“All I need –” she laughs, “is something calming. Which is what it does for me, I find my spirituality very calming and personal. But I respect how religion is communal and I respect what it can bring to people in their lives.”
Kayra walks into Zach’s free church dinner and immediately looks at the ceiling. It’s gorgeous, wood everywhere, and huge. People are milling around, all smiling. Everyone she passes shakes her hand without breaking eye contact. It isn’t comforting. Whoever was on aux is inexplicably playing ABBA and Madonna, which is kind of comforting but also…not. The buffet is delicious and international. She’s digging into her hummus when the screen projector is pulled down and the Alpha course begins. As the video begins to play, she stares in disbelief at Zach’s perfect profile. Is the guy I have a crush on trying to convert me?!
Alpha is a Canadian evangelical video course program run through local churches to open up the Gospel. The sessions happen over multiple weeks and are designed to facilitate discussion.
At their session, Zach raises his hand and reports a distaste for the gimmicky film. Kayra feels a sharp relief that he is voicing part of what she feels, but also the concerning realization that his comfort in speaking up must come from him being an insider. She definitely doesn’t feel comfortable criticizing the video in this space. The discussion leader starts to ask questions like, What would you ask God if you could meet Him? An Iranian woman grows annoyed with the pronoun and the leader rephrases, what would you ask Her? Kayra hopes the expression on her face doesn’t completely betray her bewilderment. She pays close attention to Zach’s responses, a lot of I don’t knows.
On their walk back from the church, Kayra tries to process within herself and with him, but their undeniable chemistry takes hold and soon they are prancing down the darkened streets and laughing. The deep hug as adieu is bid warms her from the street all the way back up to her bedroom where she remembers what just happened. Zach later clarifies that he had never been to the church before under such pretenses, and he does not feel warmly toward this wild new form of TV Evangelism. He was raised Christian and he fucks heavy with Jesus. I get it, Jesus is an iconic entity of charisma and love. Kayra is too busy focusing on flirting with him to feel disturbed. Or question if disturbance is even warranted. He tells her that he’s redefining his relationship to religion. It’s a journey, man. And he soothingly answers her dealbreaker questions about social issues that Christians typically hold unfavorable views toward. So it’s with me that she starts to unpack her potential interfaith relationship.
When I meet Zach at his place (when Kayra invited me to join their WFH sesh, my foremost agenda was to see the apartment which boasted both a kitchen island AND a fireplace AND three balconies), I could barely breathe because the air between him and Kayra was so thick with the yearning delicious tension of two people who just want to go upstairs and make out. He is friendly and generous, easily including me in their conversation by asking if I had a similar taste in music to Kayra, as it was recently discovered that they did not. I asked Zach to scroll through his Spotify. I clocked in his playlists, christian lo-fi, chill worship. In his liked songs, stuff by Jars of Clay. Sixpence None the Richer. Switchfoot, at which point I had to speak up. Switchfoot is a grammy-award winning alt-rock band that achieved initial success in the Christian rock scene that I am lowkey phenomenologically obsessed with. The clues were adding up with Zack, and I couldn’t resist a conversation about CCM.
“Switchfoot, huh?”
He looks at me with surprise.
“Switchfoot,” he repeats.
“I know what’s up with Switchfoot,” I say, leaning back in my chair. Early alternative Christian rock is my burgeoning area of research expertise (faith and fate. Commercial success and spiritual fulfillment. Rock ‘n roll and rock of ages. What’s. Not. To. Love).
On the phone, I ask Kayra how much shared music taste matters to her with a guy she’s seeing.
“Freshman year of college when I had Tinder, my bio was like, easily impressed by good music taste. Because my music taste is important to me, it’s a big part of who I am. And then this summer I came to the realization that it really doesn’t matter, it’s childish to let it get in the way. Of course it’s lovely to bond over, but someone having a different taste doesn’t take that away. It’s still something you can bond over because you can have interesting conversations about it.” A new dancey song has started at the beach club: I was made for lovin’ yew bay-beh boom boom boom.
“Zach was raised so differently than me, but it opens up more room for conversation and self-expression. Stuff like music, and style matters less and less to me if I feel comfortable in my own skin. The guy I like listens to Christian rock and sometimes wears clothes I don’t like…” she pauses. You were made fo’ lovin’ meee. “...and that’s okay because he treats me like una princesa.” She laughs.
“Okay, I need to go tan. God be with you.”
“And also with you.”
(Parting gift: some faves from the tumblr #catholic aesthetic tag)
j'obsesse this is magnificent
Came back to it... Better than I remember. I'm gonna print it. When r u getting your own column?