excerpts //.1.26
an amalgamation
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John Calvin believed that God, in His absolute sovereignty, elected some souls for salvation and others for eternal damnation before the creation of the world. Not on the basis of merit. Not because of future faith or works. It preceded all that. This decision was not the result of karma. But because of divine will alone. Human choice did not determine destiny; destiny revealed itself through human behavior. Destiny persisted outside of men. If John Calvin was here now, he’ll tell you that you have a label over your forehead. "Pre-destined for the gates of heaven" or "pre-destined for the pits of hell." Though i am not here to propagate ideas or a particular religion but it is essential to the point which I'm about to make.
You could be a Calvinist predestined for salvation. You could be a Calvinist predestined for damnation. Either way, the ending is already written, and the drama of living is reduced to the performance of arriving there. Your free will surmounts to nothing, not a pint of water. Your God has decided His chosen one. I do not have faith in your God or my God who was assigned to me at birth like a blood type. I was diagnosed with the God I was set to pour my faith in. I defied my parents when I refused, when I deviated from my duty. My duty to devote my name and might into service of the Almighty. I must tell you how my ungodliness was also known to me like most things. There are some holy manuscripts lying around in my father's locker, my parents vaguely mention it's spiritual connection with me, and how these things written some nineteen years ago foretell my defiance. In their religious views, even my unfaithfulness was a premonition. I was created to humble my parents. I was destined to be difficult.
If this was always going to happen then nothing I do belongs to me. If even unfaithfulness is proof, then where does agency live? Where does choice begin? In a world where every digression is immediately absorbed back into prophecy, freedom becomes an illusion. Freedom is a mindset, you only need something to remind you that you are your own person and that no one however close can command or contain you. A bold take except obviously the major issues prevailing. A privileged take except i don't have freedom either. Freedom is a decorative idea, useful for sermons, irrelevant to lived experience. In not having my doubt turned into doctrine. I want the right to exist without being interpreted as evidence for someone else’s cosmology. My defiance or my Disobedience may never contribute to substantial proof of the divinity or supreme or whatever.
What I am asking for is simple and apparently unforgivable: to not be known in advance and to never be perceived. To live without my life being read backward through prophecy. To have my refusals remain refusals, not coded affirmations. To let uncertainty stay uncertain, without rushing to sanctify it or condemn it. I am what i am not because of what i refused to believe in but because of things i still continue to pour my faith into. People, things, I'm devotedly in love with. If there is a god worth believing in, it would be one that does not need to imprison my future to secure its authority. One that can survive my questions without calling them betrayal. One that does not need a locker full of manuscripts to prove I belong to it.
Milton
Last Friday in a lecture for Doctor Faustus, we were discussing Renaissance Humanism and how our character of pivotal importance is a tragic humanist. “Humanists felt that God had bestowed humanity with unique intellectual gifts, and that cultivating those gifts was the highest form of worship, as it improved both the self and society.” Does the God I've slandered sit back and mock me as I shower Him with watering the talents He gave me? Does God take pride knowing i continue to write despite what may come? I am not serving Him yet I remember beginning to write as I begged Him to help me. Even then I knew not to pray to a particular God bestowed on me. I prayed to an entity. The unknown. A wall. My flimsy pink diaries and my shaking hands as i tried to block out screams that weren't mine. God did not help me. If God was real, He was illiterate in my cursive. Or indifferent. Or absent altogether. I was a child left abandoned and now when I'm on my feet, why must I look back and why must I make altars for Him? You may exist but you do not know me. I am still the same child begging for warmth and silence in a language i wasn't fluent in, in a language i expected you to know.
Humanists believed that cultivating the mind honoured God. But I cultivate mine because it keeps me alive. Because it gives shape to disheartening. Because it makes suffering bearable. If that looks like worship to you, then you are free to misread it. I have spent my whole life being misread. I do not write to praise You. I write because once, no one came. What kind of divinity arrives late and demands acknowledgment? It is not You, God. It is the people who created You and built You up. It was the false hope I was fed that drowned me. I don't blame You, God, because I have no proof You exist. But I won't pass You down to my kids. I won't let them fall to the ground like I fell. They won't have to fall.
Starvation
When they burn me, hunger will remain. It is the only habit, trait, state constant to me and my only characteristic. There is hunger in the depths of my stomach and I will drink poison if you hand it over. I will feast on venomous snakes. I am hungry like I wasn't fed and now I have underbags proving that I need a bottle of poison to rat it out. I am empty enough that if you handed me poison, I would not ask questions. I would take it just to feel full of something. I would have it to feel whole. I would swallow venom not out of a desire to die. But I'll take the poison if its all it takes to satiate this hunger to be everything. This must be the case with all starved creatures i suppose. I have a small, insignificant theory which must've been coined by the First Man that when you are starved long enough, your sense of danger collapses. You stop asking whether something will save you and start asking only whether it will fill the space. This must be true of all starved creatures. Hunger is an evil God on all fours. I do not want to die. I want to be fed properly.
This never-ending infinite pit is dressed with flames but it is overcome with darkness. Falling inside this pit with my burnt wings, I am lady icarus. I am clawing at the sun with my bare hands scorched and blisters forming inside my mouth. I rub my teeth against it and roll my tongue over to spit the ick out. Watch me as i descent. Scratch my ancestral bones and tell me that it'll pass. This fevered reaching. This holy warmth. Tell me that it's just a spectacle stretched for too long. Tell me that the state of home I feel right now is because of the fire that burnt my wings. Tell me how each person who falls in love with me lies.
The urge to swallow my hunger itself is undying but I don't want it anymore in my life. It's like my feet feel heavy from fatigue. Fatigue from running on a flat path. There is a path laying infront of me and I have been sprinting, panting, slashing through for the longest time. I want to stop. I want the road to end somewhere so badly. Robert, the road not taken is quite desolate and the other side of the tunnel has no light welcoming me. Am i just another deer chasing headlights? Are these innumerable headlights only my rotten figs?
Angels
I do not deserve this. You deserve worse. I did not want to do it. But you did. I ask for forgiveness. You are damned anyways.
I have been an angel to my beloved in my past life. Being infatuated feels like my last life. And what if it was? Don't make me die this time to entertain you. Don't you dare dance like a clown and make it harder for me to leave you. I cannot become this woman you refused to hate. I want to be an angel. I want be an angel tonight and for the rest of my lives. I want to fill you up with sweet lies. I want to be the Serpent. I want to be more than you could ever dream of. More than you could ever ask for. More than all these blames that they've put on my name. I want to shove myself down your throat. I want to make you kneel and bring me roses. I want to be all that and more. I want to have all that and more. I want to become. Your sweetest angel. I want to become your sweetest angel.
If I am to be your sweetest angel, let it be because I learned to fly. Let it be because I painted your cheeks with a flush of scarlet. My adrenaline rush, my hovering touch— you hope that you'll get it back. Your deceptive love, your hungry lust— only to taste me on the tip of your tongue again. Preoccupied with scheming ways to not stumble across you, i scratch my cheeks lose. My mouth tells on me. Lips split, dry, aching— the cupid’s bow pulled tight as a wire about to snap. I look wrecked in mirrors. Undivine. Unpresentable. Horrid in the very human way you left me. If I am an angel at all, it is not the kind you keep. It is the kind that transgressed, the kind that scars, the kind that flies anyway and makes you wonder whether you ever really touched me, or only the heat I left behind.
Footnotes (for the living) :
I want to give you my daughterhood : Every day I realise new ways in which you’ve changed. Growing up, I didn’t know you were capable of this— both of you. I don’t recognise you anymore, and that’s something I’m still trying to understand. What hurts the most is knowing that my brother and I grew up with two different versions of the same parents. He was given freedoms at an age where freedom was foreign to me. This isn’t about jealousy. It’s about grief for the childhood I navigated differently. I can't help but hope that both of you become first born daughters in your next life with a younger brother who you'll grow up to see being treated differently. In this life, you'll see me love my daughter in ways unimaginable.
I want to eat your soul : You have been better than me at almost everything in life. I learned your name as something I was always falling short of. I had to split myself open just to ask my mother not to bring you into our conversations, not to place you between us. You're so far away and I have love for you in my heart. Some days, though, I feel like my mother deserved you and that you deserved her in a way I never quite managed to earn. On those days, I start to believe I am a fluke. I don’t blame you for the way adults used you to measure me. I just wish you knew how lonely it felt to grow up always being compared to someone I loved. And I hope one day, when I look at you, I can do so without also seeing all the versions of myself I was told I wasn’t enough to be.
You are my resurrection : I never could've imagined that the phone cover I hand-painted could give me, you. To lose you would be my biggest loss. Having you is proof that I can uphold platonic love. I would do anything in my power just to see you happy. Your mind is a beautiful place capable of drawing graphs and flowering arithmetic. I am always rooting for you. In exams you don’t tell me about. In rooms I’ll never be in. In moments where you doubt yourself. I hope you become more than you ask for. More than you think you’re allowed to want. And I hope, through all of it, you are loved loudly without having to earn it.
In you, I rest my wrath : We were inseparable. The kind of inseparable that makes other people roll their eyes and assume it won’t last. I defended you to my parents. But it all got messy after a point. There were too many things happening at once, too many emotions without names, too many expectations that didn’t know how to survive. I didn’t leave because I stopped caring. I left because I didn’t know how to stay without breaking us further or breaking myself. Breaking the friendship was the hardest decision. After all this time, i guess we’re okay now. And that matters. But we are not what we were, and I grieve that quietly. I miss the version of us that existed before everything became complicated.
Goodbyes : thank-you for reading my work. Any typos you encounter are accidental and would like to be forgiven. Lots of love.
Ps. I wanted to rethink this or make it longer. Perhaps, none is my hands.
xx
this had officially dethroned sawan, schizophrenia, sore feet
also big fan of your covers 🫶🏻