(Ruby) Shut It All Down

Your eyes say.

It's common to relate the ideas of salvation, comfort and spiritual renewal to religions. Whatever your disturb, your need or even lack of something is, people in majority will direct you to somewhere holy, in hope that through the abstract belief that is faith and that uttering repeatedly and ceaselessly words determined and known as "prayers" a long ago will help you. However, at the same time that you seek this peace to your soul, it's inevitable to question all of that experience that you were or is being submitted to. At least with me these doubts always haunted and tortured me. And maybe that was my mainly problem.

But what can you do when you can't accept everything unconsciously and can't not look for mistakes or failures in these institutions and in what they preach? The wish of being like that other person, who absorbs things easier and avidly, almost as if they were blind and lived for it, doesn't help too much. I already wanted to be a thousand other people, for they don't have the same problems that I have or for looking like they were normal and maybe too much trivial, but it never really actually happened, to my unhappiness. Perhaps this is where wish and faith look alike. Both are believed so faithfully and with such devotion that our minds focus only to them, becoming our brains' food. But truth is, it doesn't matter, they will never come true at all.

The church was full, like always. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes. The priest screamed the words which, accordingly a convention by everyone in that place, were miraculous and the true redemption to us. The choir sang the religious songs. The people couldn't take their eyes off the altar. Many consumed everything down to the smallest detail that was being done while others distracted themselves easily to check on that woman and her clothes so they could talk trash about her behind her back later on during the week. The kids were restless in their mothers' lap or ran between the building's sideways pillars. I was one of them. Sat down, my mind ran amongst and with them, stopping by only to trip and listen intently to the songs and their melodies and harmonies.

Many times I heard they say that I was sick. But only I knew that, actually, we're all diseased. There is no one completely normal. There is no one completely sane. Everybody has their problems and emotional triggers. The only difference in me is that I wasn't capable of controlling them and, in a blink of an eye, I soon saw myself lost in my own mind. Once you have lost your way, there is no turn back, just like there's no turn back to somebody who, for example, has suffered a cerebral aneurysm. My comparison is valid because what once was sane and intact, suddenly, after the accumulation of many frustrations and feelings of an existential emptiness – that still taunts me, but terrifyingly more intense nowadays -, now is like a broken mirror, the shattered glass that cannot be repaired, fixed or put together anymore. Each piece of it reflecting a fear, an insecurity, a deadly wish. The superstition of seven years of bad luck was true in my life, although I didn't know if it would last that long.

I remember that I saw her for the very first time under the sunlight that passed through the stained glass window. Since that first moment I knew she was special. Not in the way that everybody, with sorrow, says she is. She wasn't special just because she had Down syndrome. She was special because she held the cure to all the badness that human being is conditioned to or tends to be or live. Just like me, she lived in her own world, but her world was true and pure, happy, without disturbance. She was the real representation on Earth that angels exist. Although she had her limitations, she was conscious enough in some aspects, which I can say that were the most beautiful as possible. If a help was needed, she was ready to serve you, even if with only generous and caring words that sometimes we need.

Ruby was very young and her curly hair gave her even more her natural celestial air. A conversation with her could last a whole day because the enchantment that she provoked was huge. She was even really capable of touching and changing those bad people who saw her with bad eyes and felt "sorry" for her mother for Ruby had been born that way. Some really didn't understand the concept of fallen angel and because of it instead of fighting these kinds of people; it was I who felt sorry for them.