Behold I stand at the door and knock

All is vanity, saith the preacher. Vanity and vexation of spirit.



I left my father's house.

I left because I wanted to grow up. To be a man.

I thought that if I exposed myself to risk and failure, but in a controlled environment (where I could fuck up a little and still be o.k.), then when I pulled through I would be a man.

ANd I left because my father was a person who tried to do good for the people around him, in part because he wanted to be a christian of the bible and not of the mouth (someone who loved God and his law and who sought to help others and put love for God and his service before love for himself) and in part because of the guilt locked inside him left over from the person he used to be. A person who could only express emotion through anger, and who was surrounded by emotional turbulence at all times. A bad person.

I saw this and I understood the struggle in him, between doing the good that he saw as his duty, and railing at the injustice of the prospertiy of those around him while he sank deeper into despair and poverty (not just of the body but also of the spirit).

And having seen, I could not ignore that I had had my part in this play. That my presence not only deepened his despair, it also deepened his temptation; to sink into old habits and let rage save him from the chaos of his life and wear the guise of control.

So I left.

But now I am faced with the epithany. The great and towering, piercing light of knowlege that has burned away my comforting friends. That has scoured away the stifling blanket of denial and complacency and left me naked in the chill winds of my fear. I look at the endless horizon and I do not see endless possiblity, I see endless possiblity of failure. And loss. And regret.

Regret that cuts like a knife through the tissue paper justifications that I have carefully balanced, one after the other, to create a place where wasting my talent and my time because I am afraid to be rejected and hurt is not only ok, but my only choice.

Now I stand at the crossroads.

In one hand, I hold the life I have always known, the possibilty that no one else will hurt me, and that while I might never be loved, or truly happy; I will still be safe. In the other hand, I hold the great void, whose weight is absence, whose shape is the  brevity of hope and the memory of toil. Whose promises of fame and happiness and love, may instead be the greater regret, the greater sorrow, and the greatest misery. WHose end may be the hell that will precurse my descent into the second death, as I spend the reward given to those who succome to despair, as I spend my birthright.

I stand at the crossroads, and I am afraid.


Behold; I stand at the door and knock. And if a man hear, let him answer and let me come in unto him.