The Left Behind

I've held religion in such contempt most of my life. The idea of organizing people to pray together should be beautiful, but it has been defiled so completely that even the word itself makes my skin crawl. I understand now that it isn't fair. My opinion is extremely biased. I've been surrounded by God pushers all my life. I have only met a handful of true devotees, and, looking back, I think they mostly just felt bad for me because I was lost and too far gone to recognize much less accept anything resembling guidance. They were right.

No, I do not plan on joining a church, although now that I'm putting it in words maybe I should. I just want to acknowledge that I was wrong. Just because something powerful has been used to abuse and control people doesn't make it evil. It was the people who were bad, not the power. We humans know so little, but we behave like we know everything. Those who are the most ignorant seem to do the most talking and have the strongest ambition. So many evil people want to control everyone and everything. It's all one big ugly lie. Here I am living in a tiny crack beneath it with most of humanity. The weight of it is crushing us. The weight of an illusion is crushing us.

Prince died. My favorite artist since adolescence. I think maybe Elvis was my favorite before that. The moment I began to feel womanhood breaking through, Prince's music began to make sense. When his work got weird, I was already weird enough to appreciate it. He spoke of the dark places inside us that we try so hard to hide that they secretly control everything we do and the innocence beneath it all that can only be freed by the admission of our guilt and weakness. Even now, many of my favorite Prince tracks are those that do not interest the mainstream. I loved him. No, not the person (I've never met him), but the artist. He was, to me, the embodiment of creative purity. He was uncensored. He was unapologetically human. He was raw. He was beautiful. 

I grieve this loss so deeply that I surprise myself. It's the final knot undone in my unraveling. All of the feelings of loss I've ever had, denied or acknowledged, have come rushing out to the surface and blocked out the sun. The amount of crying that I've done over the past few days is disturbing to me. It hasn't shown any signs of diminishing. On the contrary, I've sobbed so intensely during the last 24 hours that I'm beginning to wonder where this is leading. It has taken away my dance! I have never been without my dance before. It feels so strange.