Hello I am Afraid

I suppose I can define myself in two terms: poor and smart.

Yet never did I really experience abject poverty. Nor was I ever that smart. Very smart? Sure. But “very” is by its very nature... well, relative. And no matter how we lead our lives, we lead them only relative to how everyone we know leads theirs. AT least, relative to how we perceive they lead their lives...

My family used to go to therapy once a week. This is one of those times that we, as a culture, cut to the chase: “family therapy” is therapy for families, which means that you, dear people, caught up in forces just beyond your control, are just not functioning quite like the rest of us... So our culture presumes to teach us how to take control. Our culture, which encouraged the early marriage held together by one woman’s desire to live up to religious expectations in the face of negligence and abuse - our culture, which normalized the predictable divorce to follow - our culture, where “joie de vivre” meets pessimism and becomes “live fast while you’re young” - “our” culture, which we decide together, so that not a one of us feels we have a say...

But yes, therapy cuts to the chase. You see the psychologist who recommends a psychiatrist who promises “normalcy” (normalcy?). So now we pay our government the taxes which it renders to our psychoanalysts who shape for us a path back to being part of “our culture,” which is what - in the first place!- turned us all so far astray that we are lost - cannot become un-lost - cannot look up and dare not speak and fall and fall and fall... So our culture turns to us and, taking us under her thin and bony arm, anesthetizes us to our own hearts with chemicals with uplifting sounding names like “abilify” to cure us from its so very accidentally leading us off-course from... well, itself. “None of this was meant to happen, in the way it did, you know, but you understand - right? - but it was all intended and you are who you are today because of it and it’s all part of the plan, just the plan got a little...” What? What happened to this plan? Was I ever part of planning it? I suppose it depends on which psychiatrist whether that plan belongs to God by name, or by some other name - entropy or chance or fate or luck... Never to us.

Whatever the fuck.

But finally, I am unable to feel. Thirteen years old, and I will stare at the wall until it stares back to me and I will feel my wrists and curl up on the ground and think hopelessly “what shall I do?

what shall I do?”

And this becomes “which video game shall I play?” - which, at least this is a question I can understand! I can understand; I can understand; I can understand; I can...

I do not feel like doing anything, anything, anything... I have so many games and I do so dearly want to play and yet I am wanting... I am wanting not to want to want to play; I am wanting to want what I am so sure will give me something... well, something... something... to do...

I do still today intimately know how carpet feels against my cheeks. It has been many years since lying, staring, listless, wanting... Just wanting. I suppose I wanted not to want. I wanted something... real. Not just something to do, or someone to love, or somewhere to be... But some reason to be.

Though I did try - so earnestly I tried - God never did give this to me. I listened and listened for him, carpet in one ear but the other trained directly to the sky - the heavens up above where God is sure to sound out to me, announce to me his love!

Perhaps it is true he always spoke through others saying “feel the Father’s love,” and it is their words - some transmutation, some vessel - by which I should have felt Him and known His way... But always I would stray. There is always a question lingering in wait, ready to jump out at me and terrify me of my faith. All whose faiths I trusted most would dodge and run away, turning, I suppose, to the Father’s loving embrace... Yet I would stand in place. Looming over me, blood streaming from his face, tears cried drier than the carpet on my face... The devil, of course. These questions are but wiles and Christ came to us to put to us the charge that we should carry on, carry on, forever in his absence sure that we will never fall...

And so, as always and forever, our certainty precedes the fall. If faith should raise you up - well, it must increase the distance you will drop. This is how it works - is it not?

“No, it is not!”

... Then supposing “pride goeth before the fall,” should we be so proud to be so tall?

Then they gape at me, thirteen and confused and upset and oh he will just not let it be and they are angry... “You are derailing the lesson; we must go on.”

so we go on and on and on. do not worry for your sins, little one - you were absolved by the father’s son...

Then sin is fine, is it not? I can just... do whatever the hell I want?

But no, though the promise is absolute and you will never not find absolution in the truth, you still must carry on... carry on... carry on... worry on your sins and carry on. The reckoning will come for you, little one.

I think it was not until I was twenty, maybe twenty-one? i said “Fuck it” and was done. God is with me only if I want. You dare to say Christ walks ahead? I dare you say that to the child who walked in on the officer raping his mother and wound up tortured dead. Fuck Christ if he so happily walked ahead and laid the path for the child now dead. Fuck you if you find a way to say, “well, Christ walked on to heaven and the child is now at rest...” Fuck you and fuck your Sunday best.

Do you know what I will do? My daily best. May your sundry Sunday bests lay down for you a cushy bed on which to announce to God your death; and I will keep my breath.