Work Text:
i kiss you and it feels like redemption. i kiss you and it feels like sin.
you are a cross beneath the pad of my thumb, all sharp edges and wishing for thorns
they used to tear their backs open, the penitents, used to let their open wounds beg for mercy, bring them closer to the passion of their god
(the world is already an open wound, their god is already a scream for mercy)
there are a thousand versions of me in every generation. in this one i smoke blunts behind the library, dirt under my fingernails. i am twenty-five and it is so fucking cold here in the winter.
where would i have been in the days of the penitents? the girl dragged to a nunnery for smiling at strangers, scrubbing floors with added spit? some lazy priest drinking wine and smoking cigars and forgetting he ever called god by name?
i want to forget. i want to hate you, just a little. but you’ve burrowed under my skin. you lurk like a pustule. every time i breathe i can taste you at the back of my throat.
i inhale, deep and sweet, try not to choke on it. i can feel you listening at the back of my head, ever-present. there was a time you walked beside me, but i hardly remember that now. you loved me. i remember that. i can feel it burning in some part of me i cannot smother.
i exhale steam in a column, breathe it back down. i know i can’t smoke you out, know no matter how loose and slippery my thoughts get you’ll still be there, a humming eternity. (i miss you, i think. i miss the you with fists and wristbones pressed against my angry thumbs. i try not to remember that. missing a life i know i never lived.)
i’m a madman, though, clearly. and madmen need their coping mechanisms, and this is mine. (and you are mine, and all the thousand ways i could mean that sentence i do. it guts me, like someone carving the pit from my soul.)
there’s never been a time you weren’t there. they taught me you, at school, at church with the light shining patterns onto my skin, and i finally knew your name, the sunburst behind my ribs, the surety that there was love in the world, that it would pour through my tiny fingertips if only i let it. i didn’t know how to be stingy, then. i didn’t know how to resent you.
i learned, though.
the first time around it was easier. i thought i knew you, then. you were fire and fury and hope and i thought the kingdom had finally come. only it hadn’t. it was just you, just one broken man preaching a gospel of despair. falling temples and burning cities, my brothers with crosses on their backs and you loved them too, you knew - you knew what that meant.
you were a perversion, an antichrist, a mockery of everything we stood for and i hated you so much in that moment. i hated you, and you still loved me, and when i saw your sad useless eyes i knew i loved you too. you were never just my messiah, you were my friend, my brother, my everything. the love of my fucking life - you know what i would have done, then, to save you? i never once thought that they would kill you. tear you down from your twisted throne, bring the people back to the senses, let them learn to fight again.
they tell myths about my death, here, bowels bursting open. a death is not enough for what i did to you. they keep me in satan’s mouth, caught between the teeth and screaming, communion in reverse. maybe i am there, really. maybe these thoughts are a story i’m telling this strange child’s body, this addled man’s mind.
the betrayals this time are so much smaller, so much pettier. the fate of a nation is not at stake, only the fate of one small boy. the world crowds into his head, offers an excuse - is it that? can he pin his failures on hell, on verses of judgement and wrath, when really he just wishes God had let him win for once? win some battle that only ever mattered to him. he does not have the hope of a nation burning in his breast, here, its hopes and dreams cradled like a baby bird between his palms, wrapped tight beneath his fragile bones. he is only saving himself.
sin tastes so fucking good. he never knew that, back then. there were more important things to think of than the taste of a woman’s neck, the curve of it where his tongue could catch her perfume, the taste of stubble as he licked a jawline. he got drunk on wine and skin and tried not to remember that once he’d thought of you.
he, me, does my name even matter when the story was only ever yours? i wish i could say i’d danced to your tune, but i danced to something older and greater. when i kissed you i thought i was saving us. i thought i was saving you, fallen son of israel, eaten alive by self-hatred like some twisted pride. you were addicted to suffering, i thought.
(is it worse, if you hated it? if you begged for it to stop, if we piled our sins on top of you with every fist and every fucking time we poured our sickness into the body of another? we fucked you over so bad, and all this time we thought it was only them. only a nobody whose head we stamped on, someone who wouldn’t matter and wouldn’t tell and you took it and you painted those sins onto yourself until they screamed red, until those wounds survived a resurrection, screaming and screaming out those sins, those reckonings.
they called it passion - it was righteous rage and fury, love and tears for every one sinned against. this is what your sin looks like. *and this is how we live*.)
i still think of you. i don’t know if it’s spite or stupidity. i pray it’s neither, pray to the god that isn’t you but isn’t anybody else, either, the god we cook up when you’re too real and beautiful and broken. when you’re too fucking dangerous to get near.
i remembered you and forgot you, even when you were right there. i’d get lost in firewarmth flickering by my calves, chicken caught in my teeth and laughing at peter’s stupid, stupid jokes. you, in the firelight, you laughed and it was so beautiful it hurt my chest a little. i caught myself watching you, caught myself loving you, and it was never the way i loved God. God saved us, God burnt tracks in the desert and tore seas apart to set us free. God left me breathless. so did you, but never in the same way.
and then you fucking *reminded* me. you were a theophany, you caught my breath up like elijah into the clouds and i was left frozen, lungs torn out of my chest, so ready to forget again. it’s not like you didn’t make it easy. it’s not like i didn’t dream of your feet flat against water like glass, like a balancing trick except tricks don’t turn your insides to frostbite, don’t leave you terrified like this.
holiness, it’s not a light into an empty room, it’s the space between the stone and the grave, and the smell knocks you senseless. you always thought the holy could purify the profane, could burn up all the wrong in it and set it alight in love. if God was always stronger for you, then why did our city burn? why were our women raped and our children slaughtered, sent back to egypt, laid down on the altar of moloch while all our god could do was weep and die?
was that you? am i supposed to believe that the man who cradled children in his lap and cried at his sister’s wedding poured out flames on us, for…for what? for not being enslaved right? for bowing to rome too much or not enough? what did we do wrong? how was trying to make them see our humanity ever going to work when they wanted to tear apart our temple like the women they knocked unconscious? they worshipped mammon and blood, but we were the ones you put to the sword?
throw off the constraints of our covenant like the husk, embrace the whole fucking world. the world wrecked us, do you not remember that? the world tore us open, and you want us to open our arms so they can reach our beating hearts more easy?
i don’t know you. i don’t know what i want from you. you twist out of my grasp, you’re light burning graveclothes, setting light to bones until my pollution has turned to blinding light, you’re a man by the fireside laughing with his head in his hands, smearing dust across my cheek like a blessing. you’re the voice in my head when i wake up screaming and aching and ashamed, every inch of me burning and alive, all the thoughts i tucked down deep bursting from the melting soil.
you loved me and i loved you, and it wasn’t enough. i trace holy bibles and watch stained glass and wonder if it ever will be.