As I drove down the highway leading to the train tracks, I took note of the familiar depression upon my chest, hanging heavy like a lock and chain around the neck and heart. I rode on automatic, my mind lost in self-examination, mere centimeters away from the distorted mirror of self-reflection. Every breath, every blink, every thought was leaden with a debilitating hopelessness. "What am I doing? What have I done? What can I do? How can I decide?" The words slump about me in a heap, lying like masonry for a brick cell, and I have all but ignored its presence, when it may be too late for me to climb out.
Today I spent an extended amount of time with other Christians. I do not mean to say like people who are related to pastor or individuals who take them to church each Sunday, but people who believed that their way was the only way, who referred to the Bible constantly and put it above all other text. There is no room for common ground with others who didn't share their views, as per the bible. I spent time with them today.
The loneliness was so isolating. At points in their conversations with one another, I simply plugged in my headphones and tried drown out the dealings with the ejection of church members.
Perhaps I am like Damocles--This may be the price that I pay for such pursuits of knowledge. My desired peers seem so far from me, and I can no longer speak their language or sing with such conviction. Yet, it is, in essence, the very seat I sought to have the privilege to sit in. Maybe it would be better not to seek knowledge. Maybe it would be better to simply blindly obey, to forget, to regress to a state of infantile belief. However, that which is known, cannot be unknown. The pursuit of knowledge cannot be so easily abandoned, for it may be even harder to kill than hope itself: the desire for truth may be the force that has driven humanity for all the accomplishments and progress it has been accredited.
In truth, even if I could simply wipe the desire for proof, for knowledge, for logical understandings, I would still be left with the bereft discontent with the remainder. How could I ever believe in you, God? How could I bring myself to believe that I could survive the peelings of something that was fused to me like gauze being peeled back after surviving being burned alive? The pain feels almost the same...
Maybe I've been a fool to believe in anything like morality. Maybe, I should just let go of any and all notions of love, kindness, joyfulness, goodness, peace, and happiness. Perhaps these were nothing more than fairy tales, and I am outgrowing them. Perhaps I am on the right path in deadening myself to any emotional contact to family and friends, and would instead turn into a stone-heart being, knowing not mercy or compassion from any, only manipulation.
On the way home, riding down the highway to the train tracks, my gaze turn towards the open window, and I spied the sentinel mountains watching from a distance. The radio played a song I knew well. I would've felt the lyrics months ago... but now, all I can tell myself is.
"It's only rhetoric. There is no spiritual power in it. There's now spiritual power in anything."
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