Goth Church on Friday Nights

I think this photo ended up in a book about alternative scenes. We posed for the writer, but I can’t remember the title.

He didn’t know.
But now we do.

Turns out, we both used to show up every Friday night to the same ritual… our little goth church.
Barely 18, dressed in our sharpest black, paying our $10 tithe to the industrial goth gods, the ones who lived behind the smoke machine and screamed through the speakers.

Maybe we met.
Maybe we didn’t.

Maybe I cut him off in line.
Maybe I stole his parking spot.
Maybe I elbowed past him when the club let out and everyone spilled into the street like we’d just gotten a pardon from Hades.
Maybe he handed me a flyer for his band and without knowing I dropped it on the sidewalk.

Back then, the club was a kung-fu movie audition in disguise… limbs flying, boots stomping, bodies moving in angles that would give Euclid a headache. And yet, some of them didn’t dance. Some stood still, half-lit under the fog machines, watching. Maybe, just maybe, he was one of those… the kind who didn’t need to move to be present. A Watcher. One who observed enough movement to carry it home and sketch it later in silence.

Goth guys were shy back then.
It was like walking into a baby bat rescue shelter.
If you wanted one, you had to point and say,
‘I want that one.’
And maybe… just maybe… he was one of the ones who stood still,
clutching a plastic cup and silently praying to be summoned for a dance.

And the funny part is… after all those Friday nights at goth church, I ended up in one of their bat caves.
Not as a disciple.
More like a modern‑day goddess from another realm… the kind where we don’t follow north stars, we follow chickens through a cornfield maze until they point toward the exit.

Meeting him felt like a “deja vu with fangs.”
I hugged him… maybe too tight. I might've cut off his circulation, but it’s hard to say when someone’s already pale.
What do you even tell the paramedics? “Uh, he’s pale?” How pale? “Goth pale?”
So yeah… maybe I squeezed a little too hard.
But it had been a long time coming.

I called it a Reverse “Disney hug”. He broke the spell first, so the ritual ended.

So in the end, I did pose for him.
Yes… like Rose from Titanic... just not as glamorous.
I think I looked like I was about to be embalmed.
Still, he complimented me and said I held so still.
He had no idea I was in full zombie-brain mode… nerves disintegrating, thoughts scrambled.
I told him it was probably the horse tranquilizer.
Or maybe I just glued myself to the chair.
Either way, I made it through.

But that was the easy part.

It didn’t even cross my mind I had to take the sketch with me. And just like in the military: I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell. Maybe deep down I thought he was just gonna sketch me like one of those 90s toy sketch pads… you know, the kind where the drawing disappears if you shake it too hard. Temporary. Erasable. No evidence.

The hard part was figuring out how to keep my parents from finding the artwork. I hadn’t realized I’d be taking it home with me… and I happened to be staying with my religious mother, who I was pretty sure would have to go to church twice that week just to pray away whatever sin she thought I’d committed. When I told her the truth, she slammed the brakes so hard I was glad I had my seatbelt on. In that moment, I was teenager again. And I think she’s still lighting candles.