Mess You Made

prologue.

Malibu Adams.

May 15th 2020.

Anger is a parasite. It's all we hear. They teach you it in school and even if not, we're all socialised, one way or another to stay away from it. The uglier of the emotions. Wrath and fury and violence, you'll find that every God in every religion frowns upon it.

I was young when taught the Epistle of James. Preached to about God's words.

Be slow to anger.

Then, 1 Corinthians in Sunday school. I only remember Sunday school in a childlike haze, never much cared about all of God's words as much as I cared about sitting by Sierra and drawing on our fingers at the innocent age of six.

We're unsullied when we're six. Guiltless and blameless and untarnished by big bad things. Religion is likened to magic to us then. We don't really comprehend it. We're simply listening to those that are older than us because the ideals of angels and heaven seem pretty, the concept of hell makes us want to behave and death, even then, it's difficult to fathom without covering it in holiness.

I remember us chanting all together, making the words resound against the church's beams like a relentless echo. Love is kind and love is not arrogant or rude and it is not irritable or resentful.

Never really knew the words we were saying, except that we had to say them.

I knew, eventually. Love is peace. It isn't the place for the uglier emotions to reside and I believed it because I was never shown otherwise.

But I'm sat, now, in the first pew in the church I was raised in and the childlike laughter, the sun that always reflected through stained glass, the sounds of all the kids in town is all distant. There are no pens to draw with anymore - the sound of innocence is long smothered by what it is to fall out of that haze and I ache for it. To be six. To believe love is peace. To not know that everybody has always just been lying to me.

Lied. Left and right. They lied. God always talked such a good game of peaceful love — but now the only sunlight is reflecting off her coffin presented at the front of the church. The only sounds are the guttural sobs from people who never knew her.

It's weird. How my brother and I are the only ones paralysed and silent. It's weird what death does to you when it slams down over your heads all of a sudden.

Love's peaceful. But now she's dead. And my love suddenly has nowhere to go anymore because the person it was for is now nothing but bones and blood and headed to nowhere, no future, no present. There will be nothing for her except pounds of soil crushing her coffin until her bones decompose, her organs wither, the face I loved will become a skeleton — and everyone fucking lied.

It is anything but peaceful. How can he possibly imagine peace to filter through my body, my body that's bleeding out on this pew like hers never should have. She's my sister. Our blood is the same, and now mine's turning black, because whatever love we had was tainted. It can never be peaceful again.

I feel it souring under my skin like milk. Feel it rotting. Feel the biology that bound us together turn black, black, black.

Maybe God was wrong, because it is far too easy for me to resent. It shouldn't be this easy if love isn't meant for it.

Anger's a parasite. Infests. Takes you whole. Stay away from it, all the Gods say. Love isn't the place for it.

Slow, be slow to be angry and I always was, I was always fearful of anger but I can feel it now.

It has me in its clutches and it suddenly feels safe. The claws of it feel like the only antidote to my skin that's just been set aflame, pillows to a bruised body, and these claws are the only ones dragging my body out from the soil. They might be my only savior. Safer than the rest of the world that's now so much scarier than it was when I was six. I don't think I will ever be anything else again.