&#034I&#039ve been looking for a savior in these dirty streets, looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets. I&#039ve been raising my hands up, drive another nail in. Just what God needs, one more victim.&#034 -Tori Amos, &#034Crucify&#034

So I&#039m an athiest. I think the better part of the world knows this, and I don&#039t try to hide it. But if I had to name a god/goddess or deity that I would worship, love with my whole being, follow their teachings and word, it would be Tori Amos. Yeah, I get the fact that she&#039s human (So was that Jesus fella but people worship him, don&#039t they?) and therefore doesn&#039t meet most people&#039s immediate definition of a god, but she and her songs mean more to me than Mother Church ever did or will, and her music touches me in a way that most would call spiritual.

December 1995, sitting on the mottled carpet in my room in my parents&#039 basement, with a borrowed portable CD player and CD from my boyfriend, I first heard the bewitching piano and enrapturing vocals of Tori. Little Earthquakes, &#034Crucify.&#034 I was hooked. Maybe it was the troubled time I was going through as a teenager, maybe it was the fact that it was just so different from everything else I knew, or maybe it&#039s just because Tori&#039s so amazing, but I couldn&#039t stop listening, couldn&#039t stop reading the words in the insert, couldn&#039t get the songs out of my head. I was entranced. She was telling me my life, my miseries, my pain, and yet she was making it sound beautiful, meaningful. &#034Crucify,&#034 &#034Silent All These Years,&#034 &#034Winter,&#034 &#034Leather.&#034 I even trembled when I heard &#034Me and a Gun,&#034 the song about Tori&#039s rape, a chilling a capella that shook me, made me feel more emotions than I had felt in a long time. Who could blame me for switching gods from a cold, distant deity who had only ever just caused me mental anguish and torment to a warm, loving, beautiful goddess who spoke to me and opened me up to feeling alive again?

I bought the CD and probably just about wore it out. I bought her other CDs. I didn&#039t know anyone else who had even heard of her before Ian, something else to draw me closer to him because he loved the same goddess as me even if he doesn&#039t talk about her in those terms. I even saw her in concert and thought I would cry when I saw her glide across stage, my goddess who walks on the ground. It was magical. I can still feel the joy that spread through me, still see the glow around her between those pianos singing the songs I have had memorized for years. I was happy.

I somehow lost my first CD, my precious Little Earthquakes. I suspect that I either loaned it out or it ended up in a wrong case somehow and is just gone. I don&#039t know what took me so long to re-order it, but I did just this week. It came in yesterday, and I played it, basking in the warmth with which it fills me, elates me. I&#039m listening to it now at work (though I brought the broken headphones so I&#039m only getting one earful), and could listen to it for forever and never tire of it.

&#034I&#039ve got enough guilt to start my own religion.&#034 In me, she already has started one.

Posted: June 4, 2004 at 10:40 am during &#034Happy Phantom.&#034