I was sitting at an old lady’s house, with just one lamp, in the dark. I had an overnight shift as a caretaker, and the lady had finally calmed down and gone to bed, but I couldn’t go to sleep. I was writing in a journal that I hadn’t touched in months, trying to explain to myself what I was thinking and feeling. It was all a mess.
It seems to me that God is a story we made up, an unreality, but outside the story there is only energy, mass, and biology. More unrealities. I’ve spent a lot of time with the elderly lately, with my job. I’ve been with them day in and day out. I’ve seen their conscious minds’ struggle, their fear, as their bodies unravel- except their minds are unraveling as well. Consciousness- doesn’t it end in death? And in death there is nothing.
I have been struggling with my imaginary God. The more I read about him- his past- the things he used to be- I hate him. I hate the fact that he passed himself off as a moral being when he hadn’t the slightest clue what morality is and apparently lacked the self awareness to even make a consistent deception about his own character.
I hate most of all that I believed him. That I… idolized him. All the agony I poured into the hope that some how I could… become… what…
I loved him. I did. More than anything- or anyone. Now- in so many ways- he’s gone.
I am eaten up with jealousy of people who can believe. What’s wrong with me? What singled me out for this bizarre fate searching for and hating God?
I can’t go to church anymore. The fat happy smiles, the words, the praise of a person who never existed, and who, if he did exist, exalted himself, lied about almost everything, and then committed murder in the darkness of our eyes.
It all hurts like literal fire. Is this Hell? The Absence of God? Only I am the only one who seems to feel it, and people look at me jovially and ask, ‘So, how are you doing?’ And I have to smile politely and make up a correct answer.
I finally realized why its been so hard for me to make the necessary preparations for this spring. I keep procrastinating on important things, and wasn’t sure why. Maybe it should have been obvious. My plan is to set up near my family- but I dread going home.
My mom has refused to respond to anything I’ve said about religion. But she overwhelms with concern for me, can’t wait for me to get home, will send someone out right now to help me move.
My mom- whose spent the emotionally worst moments of her life obsessively researching the apocalypse- hoping that the world will just end, now, and she’ll be in heaven.
I can’t help wondering if she thinks that, if she could just get me home again, all of the evil will seep out of my mind like water out of a sponge and be replaced by Love and I’ll be Saved again. And everything will be happy.
Finally I couldn’t think of anything else to write. Exhausted, I turned out the lamp and curled up on the couch. I had an odd feeling that I would dream- that all the pieces in my mind were in the right place.
And I did dream.
Here is the dream.
I dreamt about at old man. He worked at a grocery store or a cafe at a stopping point for an airline flight. There was one flight that stopped there- and one flight that went on further. There was a young man (late teens?) whom he had seen come on the incoming flight over and over. The young man had never gotten any further though- something was stopping him.
In fact, the young man was a wizard. He came from a wizard family and he wanted to go and see The World. It was the thing he most wanted, in a wide eyed, desperate, Little Mermaid style- but he could never get all the way away. He lived with his family and relations, deep underground. It was like a cave, but there were no tunnels, no outlets. Just a chamber, with muddy walls, deep underground.
Finally, after all his other attempts to leave failed, he had conspired with an other man- an evil person. This person was devious, hidden, hunted and never caught. He was immensely powerful. There was something about a girl, at the stopping point. She had become romantically involved with the evil person, and he took her out to the country, to a farm nearby. They could still see the stopping point from there.
The young man’s family was together, inside the chamber. He was gone. His younger sister, the only child there, asked about him. Why he was doing such and such? One of the adults answered her, hesitant and sad, that’s why we don’t —— about David anymore. David was sort of lost to them.
In the meanwhile, David was on the surface. He had acquired (from the evil person, I think) a strange substance. He ate it. Immediately, his eyes and jaws started chattering. He became a Giant. He walked to the stopping point, and started tearing up great handfuls of earth and buildings and trees and shaping them into a giant ball. The ball was made out of mud and people, packed together as if they were the same thing. I saw a mother and her baby. She was crying and struggling to get them out, but the mud was too sticky and thick.
He had made a giant globe. He had made The World.
Out in the country, the evil dude was standing with the girl, staring up at the globe. His eyes were wide with fascination and wonder. He wasn’t very old, either- maybe no older than David- but he was young because he was eternal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmwRQqJsegw
If all we are is a candle flame- that- flickers for a moment and goes out- I will still do the best that I can. To be a good person and to heal the world. Even if this is all I have, it’s still my responsibility.
House of Water 