barely breathing

[soundtrack. sorry for the stupid commercial.]

"i know what you're doing; i see it all too clear..."
yeah, i'm writing you another letter tonight, my dear. you just don't know when to let it go, do you? i spend forty-eight hours just shaking with anger at you, and at me for the way i let you infiltrate every cell in my body. just rage, nothing but rage, and all-consuming rage at that. it was so all-consuming that i even managed not to feel somehow blessed by your very acknowledgement of my status update. (yeah, because we're thirty, or pushing thirty, going on fifteen, apparently.) that was good. but what do you do today? you manage to wield your particular brand of half-concerned, half-pedantic wisdom at me, and damn it all, i bite. you knew i would, too. i can't put you down like that.

"everyone keeps asking, what's it all about? it used to be so certain, but i can't figure out..."
i think it was the insanity of the weekend, the loose lips that goddamn near sank this ship twice in one night. (you should really find a way to shut him up, by the way. he's gonna cause you some trouble someday, whether about me or about something else.) it really did start me thinking. what the hell are we doing? moreover, what are YOU doing? what have you been doing all along? i mean, you've told me a lot. but really, i don't know what to think about your motivations. you're either the most obvious person i've ever met or the best con artist in the history of time. i'm not sure which it is anymore. but i sure as hell make it easy for you. i always do. i always have. but after all that, i'm really not sure i want to do this. it hurts. it's hard. it's getting risky. and i always end up feeling like i've given a lot more than i got.

"what is this attraction? i only feel the pain, with nothing left to reason, and only you to blame..."
to stop spewing bile for a minute and be fair about things, it's not like i think you're lying to me. it's not an issue of dishonesty, or feeling swindled, that con artist line notwithstanding. i'm starting to feel like i've been sleeping with dexter morgan: someone who's so incapable of human closeness that the closest he'll ever get to love is, well, a charade. that's the devil's bargain he's struck. preserving the interior darkness, the solitude, at the expense of everything real around him, becoming nothing more than a full-time master of disguise. hmm. sound familiar? i mean, i pour my goddamn heart out to you every time. i've come so close to professing love for you so many times... but i hold back. i hold back for two reasons. one, it's not possible right now. there are complications. but two, i know you can't deal with that. the one time you thought i did that, well, i've never heard you so scared. it's almost like (gasp!) you would've had to feel something risky, something that you couldn't manage or control. so what are we? what is this? what am i?

"and i could stand here waiting, a fool for another day; i don't suppose it's worth the price, you're worth the price, the price that i am paying, but i'm thinking it over anyway..."
i know what i am. loyal. loyal to a fault. loyal to the biggest fault you could imagine. i can be so fucking savage when i want to be, slicing people and things out of my life without a single hesitation. i did it to you once, too. and it was hard. and it hurt. it hurt more than this does, if that's even imaginable. so i've made my own devil's bargain here. i take all of this. i take the darkness, the distance, the limits you place on your affections. i take it because i'm a fool for you. i always will be, apparently, because even as thoroughly enraged as i am, i still won't cut you off. i keep you in my heart. i hold back how i feel. i maintain my own charade, knowing that it's the closest we'll ever get. i won't let it go. you win again. you always do. you get everything you want. meanwhile, here i sit, tied in knots. again. always. you have some kind of charm, you know, and it's something you don't even understand. good thing you don't; i couldn't imagine you in full command of this. you'd be dangerous. i mean, more dangerous than you are right now, that is.

so good night, my dear. sleep the sleep of the just, as you always do. just maybe, if you think about it, consider what this is. think about me, sitting here tonight, tearing myself to shreds over you. ask yourself if the wall you've built around you keeps you as warm as my body does. you need to decide: is the image worth it? or is there something in you that will let you open the door to me? you've got your options. make your choice. because i see you better than you think i do. i know your mind, your heart, a little more than you'd like me to. and my dear, you are so much more than your charade. we are so much more than your charade. think about that the next time you wake up alone.

"i know what you're doing. i see it all too clear."

god

[in all seriousness, if you've got faith in a higher power and don't like it when people don't, i'd tread lightly here if i were you. i'm going to say things that will make you unhappy.]

many people are raised into religion. i wasn't really. i mean, i was baptized into the presbyterian faith, but it never really took, i guess. in fact, one of the many ways i tried to shoehorn myself into whatever image i thought would suit my relationship was to pretend to be a serious christian. i mean, i allowed myself to be married in a christian ceremony when i knew full good and well how little i believed in the words i was saying.

when i lost my mother, i cursed the very nature of her life on this earth. i mean, what kind of existence did she have? she was wracked by debilitating mental illness for her ENTIRE LIFE. nothing eased it, and the only relief she ever had from the static in her head came from chemicals. what kind of just and loving god would allow that? foolishness. there's no such thing as noble, redemptive suffering. i've been on that rant before. but seriously, if there's a god who would allow that kind of pain to happen and sit back and do nothing, especially if he's supposedly so all-fired concerned with every last little detail of how we live, then i want no part of that death-cult, thanks.

so i guess you could call me an enemy of religion. i don't pretend to know what the afterlife holds. that's kind of my point: i am just not arrogant enough to presume that some book of fairy stories written hundreds of years after the events were supposed to have happened is the straight-up script to success after death. nope. but even feeling that way, i used to have a live-and-let-live attitude about religion. none for me, thanks, but do what you want to do (as long as you leave me alone about it). however, in light of recent events in my life, i've moved from a detente position about living your life by some god's supposed will to an all-out war. and no, i will not be nice anymore.

my family is chocked to the gills with deep believers in a charismatic form of christianity. who knows how this happened? not me. but sure enough, they're all reeeeeeally into the whole jesus thing. my little cousins were raised on it, and somehow most of them got out OK, except for one. this girl has been tested since birth. she was born with serious health problems. by the time she was 5, she'd had surgeries that numbered in the double digits. and instead of being normal about it and treating her like a real kid, my family decided to carry her around on a little satin pillow and tell her how fragile she is. how special she is. give her all manner of special treatment, often to the detriment of her own siblings and cousins. it was abundantly clear who the favorite was in our family.

but the worst thing they did to her was the two-pronged attack on any chance she had to be a deep thinker: they filled her head with jesus, and they told her she was going to die. therefore, what we got was a kid with no direction, no intellect, and no drive. oh yeah - and since she was so steeped in christian mysticism, to put it kindly, she had no faith (ha ha) in what her doctors said, especially the part about "hey, you'd better never get pregnant, because you, the kid or both could die."

i think you know what happened next. the girl turned up pregnant by her affable-but-worthless fiance. the doctors told her, "hey, now that you disobeyed us and got pregnant, you need to end this pregnancy. it's almost a given that you, the kid or both could die." her own FATHER told her to do it. but no, that's not what god would want. the "baby" (at this time, a three-week-old clump of cells with no human identity) has a heartbeat, because that's what church told her! so the girl has basically stumbled upon a novel way to commit both suicide and homicide by refusing to put aside the dangerously irrational religious toxin to SAVE HER OWN GODDAMNED LIFE.

so my cousin is most likely going to die in six months. her kid might die too. and for what? religion. the toxic mind-rot that is charismatic religion. and when this tragedy unfolds, my grandparents and my aunt will talk about god's great plan. and i will look them in the face and say, "the blood is on your hands. YOU. DID. THIS. you killed her with your insane refusal to live in this world and your addle-brained insistence on concentrating on the next. sleep well."

killer god. killer fucking god. there's no goddamned sky-daddy; there's just this cancerous poison rotting the minds of people all over the world. the opiate of the masses? hardly. opiates at least numb the nerves. religion doesn't even promise happiness, unless you count the faux-orgasmic state of mind of "gifts of the spirit." it's a mind-fuck. that's all it is. from my cousin, to the thousands lost on september 11, to every american soldier who meets a taliban IED, to every gay teenager who slits his wrists because the church told him he was damned, it's the biggest shame of human life. religion breeds death.