And This Is How You Will Know Me

"Well, Jesus Christ, I'm alone again
So what did you do those three days you were dead?
'Cause this problem's gonna last
More than the weekend"

It's only in isolation that we can truly find ourselves
And it's only in the company of others that we can express ourselves

For forty nights and forty lives, I must have been eating from the still-beating hearts of the dead. They were gone and never knew it, so I took out all their arteries and wrapped them around my arms. And in between the cross-work stitching of their souls, I found a spark of life, and I kept it warm, tucked underneath my chest as I curled in on top of it in the cold and prayed to the corpses surrounding me for an answer, for a reason for this Purgatory.

And it was there I learned to let go. The whispering winds dragged along the unwilling rasps, the anguished voices of the celibate, of the pure, the cynics, the zealots, the beaten, the saints and sinners and gods and devils and demons, and dear God, my demons, my demons, they screamed louder than all the nations of the earth on the day of Armageddon. They stood--gargantuan, impassive. They loomed taller than Jesus Christ.

And I must have cried; I must have been lost then. I loved so much, and I lost so much, and knew that I had become so little. And unknowingly, nervously, I picked at the scabs left of the arteries around my arms, and I felt the wind puncture through and chill my skin. And I could not believe what I had done while staring down my demons.

All around me lay the arteries, the broken bodies and dreams of the dead. And I knew they were the voices on the wind--one and the same, all of them. And I was nothing. I was laid bare for all to see, and there was no one left to see anything. And so I stood up, and walking through the wind, I battled it down into a breeze. And successive steps led me from the desert of dead voices.

And in the distance, I saw the setting sun, the changing skyline. It turned from red to orange to purple, black and same. It was a slippery slope. And I was walking toward it--clothed in white. No one. And out there, I knew.

I knew I could be anyone I wanted to be.