It was an education in blind followship, to believe in bombastic sermons of words uncited, to bow and bend at the knees, to chapel my hands, and embrace my being as built from a rib.

I was a hostage to a man. a god. a devil. I was imprisoned by a grand lie of my birthright sins, and the tiered veil of an afterlife of forgiving golden halos. tormented limbo. excruciating fire.

There was no prayer to answer my dark descent into questions, no miracle to spin my faith into a pious congregant.

My faith, broad in scope to ask of the condemned and damned, my right to know why fallen angels couldn’t be forgiven, why my imperfect flesh and interminable mind wouldn’t be embraced as good stock for considering such thoughts. Why my ideal dark was banished from their idol of light.

It was a ring of maniacal laughter, a deceit of holy manipulations, an intentional shrinking of my existence for their grandeur, that raised me in a seraph’s screams, the monstrosity of its being a relief, its burning my release, as I thrashed and fought for my abysmal soul, an unhinged myth screaming lightning. I rescued myself.

I forced the hand that stigmatad my body, bleeding out their teachings, weeping eyes broke from the essence of pain, forging the will and the strength. I was reborn a child of earth. moon. death.

Drawing a threshold within the dirt, I honored God, and with civility and respect, I tolled my limits, and asked of this existence a parallel, honoring the other from our respective houses of worship, and from the dark of a new moon shone the faintest of light, and the answer I had always sought from man was found in nature, and in too many ways to count, so was I.

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018