Million-Dollar Mistake

 Grab a torch and get fire. In this game, fire represents your life. Once your fire’s out, so are you. Jeff Probst begins the first tribal council in every season of Survivor with these words, adding a layer of existential metaphor to what is commonly considered a silly reality TV show. Despite its reputation, I watch it religiously, devouring season after season. My friends poke fun at my vested interest because my love for the show contrasts with my character as someone who spends their spare time watching Italian horror films from the 1970s and art house darlings. Survivor has never been considered high art—at best staking its claim as a social experiment in the early run. Nevertheless, I spend hours enamored by my TV screen, believing that I might discover the meaning of life hidden amongst the challenges designed to exhaust the players and the betrayal of alliances. Even with the competition in the foreground, the symbol of fire underlies each moment—players boil water over low flames, two pieces of bamboo rub together to ignite dried leaves, Probst tosses flint to a tribe after the first contestant is voted off the island.

I’ve found myself often forgetting about fire even when the air outside my living room windows in Missoula, Montana sits hazy with smoke. One afternoon, I had been on my couch for hours with a season of Survivor on autoplay as I drank beer and ate popcorn, contemplating whether I would find success and win the one-million-dollar prize. Earlier that morning, I made sure to seal the windows completely, take my inhaler, and settle in for a day inside.

Though most people grow out of their asthma in adulthood, I never did, and have relied on daily medication since I was two. So, when wildfires crop up and their smoke creeps into town, I shutter myself indoors with an inhaler nearby, afraid to go outside. Before moving to Montana, I understood wildfires in the same way I conceptualized hurricanes while living in Ohio—they’re bad and destructive, but only as real as an alien invasion, which is to say, hardly in existence, some type of grand myth of destruction.

In between my time in Ohio and Montana, I spent my days in Georgia, confronted with the disastrous reality of hurricanes even though I lived four hours from the coast. When a storm began to approach the coastline and the governor called for evacuations, my little college town would fill with evacuees seeking shelter. At the Italian restaurant where I worked, we played The Weather Channel on the little TV above the bar, watching as the hurricane barreled through islands in the Gulf and up the Atlantic coastline.

With the wildfires, though, I choke on air. When I finally had to leave the comfort of my couch and the onscreen fire in Survivor, and needed to make my way outside to pick up my medication from the pharmacy, I covered my nose and mouth with my t-shirt in a lazy attempt to filter out the smoke before I inhaled. When I had to leave my apartment, the smell of burning enveloped my body.

In one season of the show, fire becomes a primary character—acting as both life-giver and destructor. Following a challenge between two players, Jeff hands the winner a clue to the hidden immunity idol, an object with the power to protect its owner from being voted off. The immunity idol clue, however, becomes associated with threat, so episode after episode, the player who receives the clue walks past Jeff to a fire pit and throws the clue in the fire, letting it turn to ash. Collectively, the players reject one of Survivor’s most ubiquitous advantages—forgoing safety for uncertainty. Once the clue has been rejected, the contestants make their way back to camp where they gather around the fire to cook their meals and talk strategy to one another. Again, fire serves as their source of nourishment and community, its destructive power momentarily lost in memory. Sometimes its presence becomes so commonplace that fire’s importance in the Survivor voting-off-the-island ritual slowly fades. Each episode in each season ends with the snuffing of a player’s torch, sending them out of the game.

I imagine that when I finally die, I’ll make my way toward Hell and be plagued with coughing the dense eternal smoke out of my lungs. Even though I’ve accepted Jesus Christ into my heart in the way that I was taught during my years as an evangelical Christian, I don’t think that he resides with me anymore, because I would no longer consider myself an evangelical Christian. I don’t know what I would consider myself, which is I why I think I’ll spend my everlasting years suffering in Hell.

As a child, I was told that I only need to ask Jesus for salvation once and from that point on, I’ll have solidified my eternal resting place. My tendencies toward scrupulosity, however, led me to confirm my salvation each day, spending time in prayer to ensure my soul would be sent to heaven upon my death. Despite my compulsive praying, though, Jesus must not be with me because church leaders also informed me that if a person ever turned away from the faith, then they never truly asked for salvation. My years of terror at burning for an eternity mean nothing. Biblically speaking, the sinner’s prayer doesn’t exist.

I think I am destined for Hell because even though I believe in Jesus and his resurrection, sometimes I don’t believe any of that, and sometimes I just don’t agree with the morality my evangelical belief has instilled within me—that I should repent for being gay, that piousness turns into prosperity, that sex makes me impure, that a God who loves his creation would force people to suffer eternally. It might not make any sense that I think I’m destined for Hell, even though I mostly don’t believe in its existence, but it’s difficult to let go of something that has been ingrained into the way I understand the world and myself.

Part of me isn’t sure where I went wrong—how I could have possibly ended up as this person instead of a woman who would have strictly adhered to Biblical truth and never questioned the reality of the whole Christianity thing to begin with. In Survivor, Jeff points out these failings by the players as their “million-dollar mistake,” the action that destines them for failure, eradicating their chance at winning the grand prize. Perhaps my million-dollar mistake was choosing worldly pleasures over truth, or maybe choosing a secular education over adherence to Scripture. As much as I would like to pinpoint a singular moment, I have yet to do so.

On an Easter morning when I was twenty-one, I tried to burn the belief in Hell out of my soul. Since I had been thirteen, I kept journals strictly related to my spiritual life. They had been stowed away in the back of my closet, a constant reminder of my evangelicalism. In the same way the castaways burned knowledge about the immunity idol, I attempted to turn my Christian past into ash.

My roommates—four evangelical women—all had gone to church. When we first moved in together, they tried to get me to go to church with them, but I always either conveniently scheduled myself to work or overslept, which really meant staying in my room until they all left so I wouldn’t have to face the barrage of questions about my spiritual descent.

When I decided to accept their offer to be the fifth roommate, I figured that moving in with four Sisters in Christ would reinvigorate my own connection to Jesus, but it had the opposite effect. My distaste with their strict worldviews, their black and white thinking, their concern about the types of people I hung out with, grated on me to the point where I barely existed in that house, choosing instead to take on extra shifts at work or crash at friends’ places. I was tired of finding Bible verses taped to the inside of our kitchen cabinets, hearing about gay people who prayed their way to heterosexuality, and being told that I should be a better example for the non-Christians who entered our household. It was easier to keep up a façade and just mostly avoid it all than it was to come clean about my destruction at the hands of communist friends from the English program and finally coming to terms with being gay.

So, I invited my friend Kaleigh over to burn the journals with me in the backyard. It seemed fitting that it was them—the two of us spent every Sunday together, often driving to Atlanta to spend afternoons drinking mimosas at the gay bars or buying subs from Publix and then sitting on a picnic table by the lake in our town. They had problems of their own, mostly in the form of a girlfriend who we could hardly convince to leave the apartment or do much of anything.

Once my roommates had left, they showed up with a bottle of wine and some lighter fluid that they had been keeping in their house for reasons unknown. I held my box of journals in both hands, having finally removed them from the top shelf in my closet, where they loomed over me like a thundercloud. I left them there because it had always felt wrong to throw them out, as if I would just be sending part of my soul to the landfill. The pages were filled with my interpretations of Scripture, prayers, my longings to know why I was so steeped in a sin I couldn’t shake. I wrote entries filled with guilt about my wrongdoings and hatred for myself and the disgust I had with never saving my parents from their fiery futures. Even though I rejected most of the teachings at the time, I felt that I needed to keep the journals as a reminder of all my imperfections. Whenever I stepped into the closet, it was as if I were staring at a rotting corpse that I had killed in a fit of rage.

“Are you sure about this?” Kaleigh asked. I nodded. Though they were a proponent of impulsively throwing things away, they picked up on the pain in my face. We walked over to the fire pit and began gathering sticks from my backyard to build a tiny fire. Kaleigh lit the flames and looked at me, a signal that it was time.

I picked up the journal at the top of the box—my most recent one, with entries dated from a year prior. Unceremoniously, I dropped it into the flames and the two of us watched as the fire slowly licked the outer edges and then all at once engulfed the pages in flame, pieces of ash floating toward the sky as an offering. My words turned to nothing, just gray dust, and I wondered if I should anoint myself with the soul of my past.

The first time I feared my own burning, I had been practicing my memorization of Sylvia Plath’s “Elm” on the staircase at my parent’s house. This was about a year before I burned the journals, and I still had a stroke of innocence about me, thinking that I was still a believer because I strictly adhered to rules and guidelines I set for my own perfection.

I don’t remember why I chose “Elm,” other than I liked Sylvia Plath and the poem fit the length requirement my professor had set. I flipped through my copy of Ariel that I had received for Christmas and tried to find something that would work.

My voice boomed from the landing; I was the only one home so I took liberty in being loud and expressive, holding the book in my hand as I walked up and down the stairs, pacing back and forth along the landing. I made sure to be careful in my articulation, in the rhythm of the words on the page.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

My throat closed and I began to choke, tears running down my face, coughs turning into sobs, body collapsed on the floor, Plath’s writing wrapping me tight as I cried and cried.

“I don’t want to go to Hell,” I whispered to myself. I heaved and then screamed, as if I had been set on fire in that moment, as if I had channeled Plath herself and felt what she felt as she took her final breaths and then descended into the depths.

I took a few deep breaths and stood up, wanting to continue on with the recitation, but beat down once again by the death dripping from the poem because it forced me to consider dying in that moment and knowing in my heart that I would not enter the kingdom of heaven.

In my attempts to escape Hell, I became a Pharisee, acting the part of a pious Christian with my rituals and the leading of Bible studies, all the while afraid to speak the name of Jesus because I knew it would expose me as a fraud. My drive to be successful and praised kept me involved, and I felt proud of my ability to fake my relationship with Jesus so well that no one saw through me. That is, until I moved out of my non-religious parents’ house, left my church after a sermon I disagreed with, and decided to live with Baptists to strengthen my relationship with Christ. They knew I was faking.

There’s this story in the Old Testament that I’ve always liked because it’s just one of those tales meant to expose a great truth about life, but upon re-reads comes across as made-up. In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar asks all of his people to bow down to a golden statue. Three men—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—refuse to obey the King’s orders, saying that they only serve one God, and that God has no other idols before him. Understandably, the King is angry and orders that the three men be thrown into a fiery furnace set seven times hotter than normal. The story goes on to say that the furnace was so hot that the guards who carried out the punishment died from the heat. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, however, not only survived, but were comforted by the presence of a fourth man who walked with them in the furnace and had the face of God.

When I was taught this story in Sunday school, the teachers always reminded me to defend my faith, even if I would face fatal punishment. My dedication to His greatness should always outweigh my fear of death. The messaging always seemed urgent, too, as if I would be constantly defending my faith to people I met, in the same way Survivor castaways must constantly prove their worth so not to be voted out of the game. I think that if I were ever on Survivor, that I would probably do fairly well, since it appears I’ll be on fire for eternity. If my fire never goes out, I can’t lose. 

Some of my journals pondered these questions, past me wondering why anyone needed to be damned to hell, if anyone was truly that bad. I often thought that I must have been that bad if not for the shed blood of Christ. My soul, too, deserved unmitigated torture. Unlike the three men, though, God would not come save me from my punishment.

Since Jesus does not reside in my heart now, it means that he must have never been there. He must have never sent the Holy Spirit to guide me on my journey of life. If all of this is true, it means that I was never really a Christ believer in the first place and I have been predestined for Hell since the beginning of time. If I knew I was destined to fail, maybe I would have never decided to play.

Sometimes I think about what Hell will be like, because I think it’s important to prepare myself for the pain and suffering. This only happens on some days, though, because Jesus is real on every fifth Tuesday and whenever I get off the phone with my grandma, but only a random guy on the third Friday of every fourth month after a thunderstorm, or something like that. He’s kind of like Schrodinger’s cat—I’ll only know if he’s alive once I die.

If I could have a conversation with Jesus right now, I’d probably get all these burning questions out of the way, in a nonchalant, non-threatening manner because I wouldn’t want to upset him. He does decide destiny, after all.

I would start the discussion with something like, “Hey, Jesus, what’s the deal with eternal hellfire, anyway?” and then he would answer with something matter-of-fact, meant to bring clarity: “Well, it has to do with the process of expunging sin from human blood. Of course, someone of your intellectual caliber, you must be familiar with this…” He pauses for a minute to stroke his chin. “It takes an eternity, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’m the only one who can wash away sins, so eternal punishment is the only alternative.”

He’d be standing below me, watching me burn on a stake. Maybe he came down to those who were being punished to offer a moment of reprieve from the excruciating pain.

“Right, so, since you have that power, could you…. forgive me of my sins so I could go to heaven? I’m not all that jazzed about this eternal punishment thing. I’m sure you understand,” I would say.

“Well, about that,” he would say, pulling a massive book out of a nonexistent pocket, “Your name isn’t written here, so unfortunately there’s nothing I can do.” He would shrug.

I would attempt to pull myself away from my stake and sneak a peek into the book. “Are you sure my name isn’t there? I think I’ve asked for forgiveness a few times… when I was 8 and again at 15, and probably three of four times in my early twenties…”

“Not here, sorry.”

“But you make the rules. You could release me!”

“Yes, that’s true, but I can’t just go changing them, can I? We don’t want murderers in heaven.”

“I didn’t murder anyone.”

“Correct, but there were…” he would pull out another massive book out of his non-pocket, flip through the pages and consult the words written there, “…a handful of times where you did sometimes not trust me as your Lord and Savior, which is exactly as bad.”

“Don’t you forgive me?”

“Well, of course,” he would say. We would continue our conversation in this circuitous manner until he left to comfort someone else or travel back to heaven, whichever came first.

I don’t think my hypothetical hell experience does true justice on suffering, but I have no idea how to conceptualize infinite pain. I don’t know anyone who can. I’m not sure I’ll ever decide whether I should live like Jesus exists. Pascal’s Wager has no real bearing on my spiritual life.

Whenever I’m outside doing anything, my thoughts often turn to Survivor and I contemplate my survivalist ability. When I worked as a summer instructor for an outdoor camp this past year in Western Montana, I realized that kids love to learn survivalist skills, so I made it a point to teach them something new every day.

One afternoon, we were learning about safely making fires and the impacts of wildfires, so my co-instructor and I took the kids on a mild hike through a ponderosa pine forest. We walked slowly, our steps careful, dried leaves crunching under our feet. We liked to play a game where we acted like we were on a secret mission in the woods, trying to find hidden secrets. My co-instructor and I made it up so the kids would refrain from screaming on the trail and disturbing the other hikers.

Slowly, we walked up to one of the ponderosas. I put my finger to my lips to remind the kids to stay quiet and modeled for them how to find the clues we sought: using our eyes to inspect the scarred bark of the pine, our hands to feel the rough out edges. Just before the hike, we talked briefly about wildfires and the lifespan of ponderosa pines to give some context to our exploration.

“Okay everyone,” I whispered, “go find your own clues about what happened here.” The kids went off in different directions, excited at their chance to play amongst themselves. I leaned up against the tree and traced my fingers against the bark, feeling the ridges and grooves that covered the trunk in protective layers. I felt a thick skin grow around my own body, grooves and edges weathered from years of fires, but they all eventually went out, as if Jesus were the second skin deflecting advances by an adversary who attempted to engulf me in flames and burn away the outer edges. The skin would be gone eventually, because even a ponderosa pine would be unable to withstand an eternal fire.

A little campfire would do me no harm; there would be consequences, sure, but I would live, moving on to see another day. Campfires are easily controllable, and wildfires, while destructive, especially on a planet where we gamble with the impacts of climate change, grow worse and worse, but still their existence promotes regrowth after destruction, like a phoenix reborn from a pile of ashes, or ashes added to compost in support of future life.

I spent the spring of my last semester as an undergrad in my professor’s yard hunting for smilax, a vine that propagates immediately upon touching the ground, its thorny vines creeping through the underground. It had been causing terror in her vegetable garden and I offered to help tame it because I needed something to do that involved working with my hands.

I drove to her house on evenings and weekends wearing tattered clothes, my windows down so I could smell the honeysuckle. Sometimes I opened my mouth to taste it.

She lived just outside of town in a neighborhood filled with winding roads and rolling hills. Sunlight peeked through the tops of trees every now and then, often blocked completely by the canopy. Despite the curving subdivision roads, the neighborhood had a wildness to it. I remember coming across a fox one evening, slowing my car to a stop so I could watch as it scurried across someone’s yard and disappeared into the bushes.

After parking my car in her driveway, I let myself in the backyard. I grabbed my garden shoes and gloves out of her small shed, let the chickens out of their coop, found the wheelbarrow and clippers and then got to work. She had tasked me with getting rid of the smilax, but there was no getting rid of smilax.

The vine reminded me of kudzu in the way it just grew and grew. When I first started working on her yard, we threw the smilax into the compost bin only to find out it took root and grew there, seemingly unperturbed by being clipped. As I removed weeds from her yard, I sorted them into two separate piles: things that we could compost without worry and things we would have to burn. The piles behind me grew steadily, aided by the repetitive motion of me pulling weeds up by the root, of me clipping the smilax as far down as possible.

I heard my professor walk up behind me and turned around. She stood in her dead husband’s well-worn clothes, which hung off her frame as if she were a child playing dress up. With her one gloved hand, she picked up some smilax. “Fuck the fucking smilax,” she said, inspecting my pile of weeds. She began putting the smilax in the wheelbarrow.

I found another vine and clipped it, but not before one of its thorns scratched my skin, drawing blood. “Fucking smilax,” I said. I wiped the blood with the bottom of my t-shirt.

“You should wear long sleeves,” my professor said. I shrugged, not bothered by the scratches that covered my arms and legs. She was right, but even in the mornings it was too hot for long-sleeves and pants.

I stood up and walked around collecting dried leaves, pine needles, and small sticks. To get rid of the smilax we had to burn it. My professor tossed a piece of a dead tree stump in my wheelbarrow, muttered something to herself and went back inside. I wheeled everything over to the copper fire pit on her back patio. The sun beat down on the cement. I began piling the organic matter into the fire pit, layering carefully. I picked up the box of matches she had left for me and began striking them to get fire, then dropping them in the pit, watching the flames catch.

As we sat together around the fire on that hot afternoon, though, she asked me if she had ever told me what happened to her husband and I said no. She reached down beside her and handed me a bag of marshmallows and a stick so I could make myself a snack. I carefully put the marshmallow on the stick and lowered it close to the embers, watching it turn golden-brown as my professor told me how the pet-sitter found her husband dead and the police questioned her and wouldn’t allow her into her house even though her dogs and cats and chickens were starving and that she hated this place and wished she could move but didn’t want to leave him behind. She didn’t want to leave him behind because she knew his soul resided in the house. I knew, too, because I heard his ghost one night while housesitting for her.

Maybe she stayed because she didn’t know how to release his spirit on to the next life. In the earlier seasons of Survivor, the final contestants perform this weird ritual where they take a long hike, collecting memorabilia representing each of their fallen competitors. At the end of the hike, they burn the memorabilia on a pyre to honor those who have made it possible for them to be up for the million-dollar prize. It always seemed kind of goofy, since they were on their way to see “the fallen” at the Final Tribal Council where the winner would be decided, but now I think there might be some wisdom in honoring those who have passed.

Maybe I should have asked my professor if she wanted to perform a ritual to release her husband into the next life, but instead I ignored that urge and just watched as the low smilax flames turned the marshmallow gooey and soft.  I made a mental note to dump the ash in the compost the next day.

After I tore pages from the binding of my journals, I threw the innards into the flames and leaned in close to the embers so I could feel their heat on my face, because I wanted to get used to the feeling of my skin melting off of my bones. My wish for death coincided with my wish for Hell, something I believed I deserve, the motive behind burning my words, page after page.

My eyes followed the ashes as they released themselves toward the sky, the body of Jesus burned before me and traveling to reunite with the soul in heaven. Jesus is said to have spent three days in Hell, between his crucifixion and rising from the tomb. I assume that he suffered, because that’s what I’ve been taught, but I cannot imagine a benevolent creator allowing his people to suffer that type of pain after he had been tortured himself. His whole reason for existing was to take punishment away from humanity.

Pain grew inside my chest as the pages continued to burn, fire inside my own body, soul being scorched clean so I could seek renewal in the near future. I wish that were true. I think it was just Jesus being burned from my heart. I like to think I don’t really care. I try to act like I don’t care about a lot of this spiritual nonsense, because it often seems to be more trouble than its worth. My soul aches with exhaustion at spending each of my days trapped in guilt at all the sins I’ve committed, and I know I’ve committed them because the Bible tells me so.

Life after life is still life, because my soul would still be alive. The act of burning means I’m still alive so Hell is worse than death, and I think that’s the point that evangelists make. We don’t just die. In Survivor, the torch is out and the player is gone, they reach their death in the game. If Jesus would just snuff my torch when I reached my end, perhaps then, I would have more peace about death and not fear my fiery future.

Sydney Bollinger is a Charleston-based writer. She earned an MS in Environmental Studies (Environmental Writing) from the University of Montana. While studying for her MS, she served as Editor for Camas Magazine. Read her work in This Present Former Glory, Dunes Review, and other places. Find her online @sydboll.