Dear Destiny

 

I understand you have quite the kick, I feel my bones shatter as you speak. I understand you are using my tongue and my eyes to render me so unnaturally weak. I understand you are here to teach. I see you there morphing into my friend wearing the latest trends and smoking down my throat, until the fear and the pain come out shaking, crying, naked. I understand you, so well, my stomach has never felt worse, my brain never so open and lacerated, my heart never so broken into so many pieces, and I understand how well you have understood me, and where I need improvement, where renovation after complete ruin.

I understand your work, and your victory, which lies in my defeat. I understand I must capitulate if I am to be destroyed easier, I should bow my head and never speak. I understand every area where I lack, I see why I am such a worthless quack, and I lie waiting, to be well done, so you may finally turn me on my broken back, and display me to the world, expose my imperfect divinity

I understand finally the odds that are playing between me and my womb, fertile and waiting and alone. I understand my purpose, to stand against the wind, to know it wrong and unwise and unworthy, to know it useless and untried and untamed and completely self-sacrificial, to know it ruthless and waiting and impersonal and lonely, to know it well, to oppose it anyway, always and unwell.

I feel the knowledge that only helplessness can bring, I feel the hatred that only I can conceive, I feel the destruction in these years that I have lived, and the many more I plan to deceive, in the hope of an objective hazy, unknown and grim. I feel these wastes perennially soaking from my skin, I feel the little spark I make with fuel from so many many hours of frightening sin. I feel the enormity of the goodness I lack, like a cloud bearing rain, so close, so huge, I float through feeling nothing but the occasional tendril, of deathly cold, with a shiver and a chill, a shard and a thrill

I feel my mortality, and time, both huge and negligible in each battle. I feel each strength of mine that disarms and debilitates me, I feel the other side, without seeing a thing.

I feel unjust and cynical, lost and lyrical. I feel like music just before it stops, like a mountain of dust that I always carried, and always crossed, I feel a sneeze coming all the time

I want to understand you and I want to leave you. Never as much as now, do I feel how contentious we are, how much at odds with each other, how odd we sound when we fight. I want to believe you exist. Make a Ravana-Hydra effigy of you with ten heads, a fierce, undoubtful villainy, and burn you to the ground, once a year, ten times a day. I want always, to be somewhere else, sometime else, someone else

 

And finally, a footnote to self
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one - Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird