Speaking With Tongues

Chapter Two

Chapter Two, If You Can’t Choose Happiness, Let Someone Else Choose It For You. 

Not long before the disintegration of my charmed life (I know- cliche), I asked my mom if I could go to my friend’s birthday party, on a Sunday, and she just looked at me with exaggerated disbelief and said, “On Sunday?” Yes, on Sunday. Does God really take roll? That’s another thing. Brother Liam constantly evangelizes to me about the incalculable (and yet he calculated it) importance of attending church and how God will “forgive you if you come to church at 9:15 one Sunday (the service starts at 9:00) and maybe the next Sunday too, and who knows....maybe even the third. But the fourth one...the fifth one...” How would anyone even know something like that about God? I've met approximately one person, ever, who cared to confront their own ideas and be curious about their logical soundness. No one else has humored themselves, as far as I know.

People with free will butt heads all the time. And it is a sad truth that those who have no free will are constantly drawn in to other people’s realities and start to believe it as their own. Maybe it’s even sadder though that I realize this and refuse to be an accesory in someone else’s big picture, because then I can’t even be under an illusion of an illusion of happiness. If I can’t have a good dream, what benefit do I have from being in some happy person’s dream, even if I was happy in it?

Anyway, just so you know, I used to think like Brother Liam too, and I used to care about things too. Before the rather sudden and effortless sloughing of my religious carapace. Without that skin, all things near and dear revealed themselves as mere proximity infatuations. Like going to church just because you were practically conceived and birthed right on the pew.

Boo hoo me. So I had a charmed life, and what, now I wanted someone to feel sorry for me because I suddenly realized I had a charmed life? Maybe. Well, not anymore. I don't give a shit now. But sure, I wanted to be angry, to punish people for hiding the world from me and indoctrinating me in their ignorance.

The thing is though- and I loathe having to admit this- that even those things you are a part of by no choice of your own, make your life seem purposeful. So when you lose even all the things you never really asked for in the first place, you're nevertheless disappointed. It’s hard to say what exactly made me realize all of this and lose everything. There isn’t one specific incident or thought or person that is the sole reason for it. Rufus tells me that if I "let my emotions access my memory," I'd figure it out. Whatever that means.

When my mom or James or Brother Liam or whomever visits, they always tell me that the only way I’ll get out is if I start caring for myself again, but that’s a bunch of bull because really, I don’t give a damn about anyone but myself. If you hadn't noticed, I'm a narcissist. What I need, in order to get myself out, is to believe things again, things outside myself. And most of all, what I need is to believe in the existence of love and that it makes even unhappiness worth experiencing. But I know, for a fact, that I will never get out of here, nor do I want to, because I can never, ever believe in love. Nor do I want to.