Losing My Religion

I sit in silence mulling over all that has passed, and all that has passed me by. 

I was raised up a certain way to become a certain somebody but I have strayed from that path onto uncertainty.  It does not rain anymore, and nothing is evergreen.  That shallow path has dried up and left me to see all that is twisted inside of this barely-there body. 

Did I think I could really sort it all out so easily?  Follow the path set by others, the path I foolishly believed to be my own?  Perhaps, there will come a day when I’ll finally understand: that shriveled, wretched path was never mine, it was theirs. 

I lay down on this tuft of soft heather, inhaling the petrichor that has plagued me since birth.  It is one scent that invokes feelings in all of us, and this generalization of human emotion comforts me like an old childhood book.  Ripped at the seams, dusty, with old yellowing pages, but still mine.  The world continues to spin on its own axis, oblivious to the human joy and suffering, oblivious to perhaps humans.  The universe continues to expand, and exist.  It does not require human thought. Three children died in a hospital today, and one was mixed up with another.  Two were born with the same religion, the third was not.  The parents returned the mixed up child, barely suppressing the urge to toss that bundle of dead organs out of their pious arms.  This child that had known the world for all of a month, and even then not known it at all; differentiated by a method of worshiping a god that couldn’t bring himself to care. 

This divine being created the universe, supposedly, or at least he created us.  And then as time began to pass, time we constructed for our benefit he recognized us as everything he was not.  We were not tolerant, not virtuous, we couldn’t love unconditionally, we murdered and pillaged and we destroyed and warred.  We weren’t perfect, and as time passed for us, he too passed away. 

No, God isn’t dead and we haven’t killed him.  It’s laughable don’t you think, to think ourselves capable of killing something like that, something which we don’t even fully understand yet, comprehend.  Maybe he shifted his focus elsewhere, to some other race or creation he prefers over us.  He turned his backs on us and in some way on himself.  I can’t blame him either, look at us living on with a definition of humanity that doesn’t define humans at all.  We segregate ourselves according to geography, caste, creed, religion, color, belief, culture.  We’re all the same inside. 

So I look towards the left from my blissful tuft of ignorance, and I see men knocking down the doors of all who dare to follow a belief other than their own.  They scream and chant, and go berserk all for their own purposes, rather than god’s.  Which god of war told them to eradicate anyone who chose to follow a different path? 

To my right, I see Death.  She has grown weary of not the fallen ones but of those who are left standing behind their towers, safe from the fire they’ve set across the lands.  I used to pity her, but now I desire her more than anything and why shouldn’t I?  She is a heaven set apart for us by the deserter god.  Not an afterlife so to speak, but a brief reprieve from the current life, if you can call it that.  She is divinity on her own and the rare times I worship; it is at her altar I find peace.  She makes a single promise, and never betrays.  She comes for all of us, and it is this certainty of her arrival I chose to believe in. 

I was not born who I am; I was made into this creature of shame and humility.  This religion does not belong to me, it belongs to them.  It is not mine, it is theirs.  I will worship the divine on my own terms and I will worship all I deem fit from the vast universe to the setting sun, from the emerging stars to the burning pyre of my beloved.  I chose my own path, because it will be mine and not theirs.