Dying Declaration

Press Play.

The lonely bulb of light lies hidden beneath a curtained shade, defective and without a friend. Shining alone, it watches the boy with the imprint of God's hand across his face. A messy room paves the way for depression, it scolds feebly. The boy just shrugs.

He brings his knees to his chest. The smell of dirty pajamas seems appropriate now more than ever, he thinks. He swallows, fights back, but the tears still come. He rocks himself uselessly, and tries to imagine a place where things are different. He's done just what he's always done; not just with others, but with himself. He's come full circle, not just with others, but with himself. I was only fooling myself... and apparently, those who wanted to believe in me.

He was provided a simple task, one question to ask himself: Who am I? Answering that question that provided him not with any sort of joy or purpose, but instead only sped up his inevitable destruction. The more that he began to think about it, the more he realized his place in the world: tucked away six feet underground. His entire life was a set-up; a cosmic joke in which he was in the clown suit, fumbling about in front of an Almighty God.

"Finding myself," He never learned to fight back; he had been scared and lectured into submission. He was never very creative; all of his creativity was confiscated under the ruse of being inappropriate. He was never very happy: he never knew why, but the little offenses he committed always stayed with him. Everything always hurt too much. He was always too happy, too sad, and too quickly.

He tried to change. He began to mellow out, he began to fight back, he began to not care about the lines he had crossed. But he failed. In all his efforts, he came up short, again. How could I believe that there was a happy ending at the end of this story?

He is left with the knowledge that he's always known: Biblically speaking, my life is forfeit. Personally speaking, I've never not believed in the God of Abraham and Jacob and Issac and Ishmael. Honestly speaking, I can never undo the complexities of my attractions. Logically speaking, it would have been better for me if I had never been born.

No good deed goes unpunished. No prosperity stays unsoured. No happiness stems from life. Nothing in this life matters. Nothing in this life counts. All that can be said is that that boy's life had no instinctual joy, no internalized mirth, that can combat the reality:

"If a man lies with another man  as one would with a woman, they shall both be put to death: their blood is on their own hands." -Leviticus 20:22