life on earth

A Story by elizabeth

short prose on what it's like to grow in this tumultuous world, touches on religion, addiction, abortion, love, self-loathing, and suicide. the great vices.

Someone once told me that if I repented, I could make it to heaven still. As if I were searching for it on a lifelong goose chase, “Have you found Jesus yet?”. Like he’s f*****g waiting for all of us in his pious throne of thorns. Through the mess I’ve created for myself, how am I supposed to search for an entity that is famous for being an alleged biological fluke? I don’t have time for Jesus, and out of respect for the real-life dead man in his thousand-year-old grave, I safely say Jesus doesn’t have time for me.

Bring your idols to my doorstep, I have no love or use for them any longer. Stand at my threshold and speak words of enticing forgiveness, they fall upon my deaf ears of science and matter. Hold your loving eyes upon my unsure but strong ones and know that what is real is that I am here. I am here and you are there, that is what is real. Feel the breath of a timeless soul rushing to you as I do every day, and know I have no use for God. Bring your idols to my doorstep, they are dead and gone but now I am here. Isn’t that enough?

Stone cold is the description of myself that I beg for. She feels nothing, walks with no one, begs for nothing. She is heartless and godless in a time of such great wars. I wait for the day it will come to me so I can stop begging a silent God to kill me. Instead, my fully functioning heart passes long nights in preparation for the ambiguity and sorrow of adult life ahead. Waiting for joy to happen is such a cumbersome house to renovate, the walls tear themselves down every hour, the windows can’t seem to shine, and no fires can be built in that crumbling brick hearth. I promised to build a home for her just as I wanted, the home where joy could be the truth. She passed along with my hopes for a stone-cold description. I still beg for an end to this Sisyphean task and press new brick into the walls daily, just to find dust in the morning.

Girls can disappear easily and without question, they leave no trail in their wake and no one hunts them. Why does no one hunt us? Do we not matter, is the scent of our hair and the sway of our hips not enticing enough to chase? I don’t mean to touch or to come into. I mean to break apart surgically and disappear into the expansive layers behind every woman, to crumble the exterior and hold the remains of firey disguise. Only children chase us and know us in the truth that we hide under the folds of complacency, the ones we bear will chase us forever and take our gods as their own. We are the creator of worlds which we can never disappear from.

When you love an addict in any capacity, you will see the smile. A son returning from college, a wife stuck in the suburbs, a beautiful boy who can’t figure a way out of his mind. They all have the smile. If you’ve seen it you would know exactly what I’m talking about, it comes after you ask if they’re using. They grin shakily and laugh a bit, hurridly dismissing the accusation while still being the person you love that happens to be an addict. In the church, they go through the familiar motions, forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have lied, cheated, stolen, broken hearts, begged, harmed myself, put others in danger, and through all this I let someone love me. Aren’t these the true reasons we beg them to stop and save themselves? The drug itself isn’t harmful, it’s the smile that comes when you ask about it. The drug is a symptom with no resolve.

Constantly I stand at the edge of disaster, a place which I have grown to know as my home and I enjoy sitting comfortably with my feet dangling into misty auras. On nights such as this, I gather up my 3 seconds of courage and peer over into the precipice of damnation. A mirror image of myself is always waiting with open arms, begging me to join her in solitude. I find myself so drawn to her at times, it looks so simple to lie there and waste away. Divine fear brings me back. Heaven is waiting if only can make my back from the edge into the land of the living.