The silver lining where love and god meet is indistinct, but I will try to outline it for you anyway. 

I am atheist, but I was raised religious, and always have been. See, God is as second nature to me as flight is to prey, as gravity is to a star. I was faithful once, woven within the lines of pseudo-forgiveness and scraped knees just like everyone else. I was embroidered with faith. By all rights of heaven, I was the breath of it. I chased ideations of God — I was God. 

What stripped me of this divinity? What enabled it in the first place? It’s simple.

Blind faith — as vicious as war, as common as oxygen. I could be enlightened in Corinthians as long as I ignored Job. I didn’t realize I was impaled with a double-edged sword. Understand: we were never built for Eden. Understand: God was only good as long as you didn’t actually know him. Though, if you say this, it will make people angry – but if you live it, you become the birthright of war. 

Either way, you’ve betrayed yourself.

A fact: I was indicted with false security, but I was always aware of it. How many nights did my mom spend crouched at my bed, promising me I was destined for some kind of heaven? I have numerous accounts of being head bowed in the back isles, spouting words as if I could uncondemn myself. (God if you’re there.)

A fact: I write for Judas’ children. The ones who lower their heads at the mention of homosexuality. Who rebuked heaven at the price of themselves. Who were made in God’s image, but not in his love. Who carved out hatred but could never outcarve God. My words are to convey the conviction in the inheritance of our grief.

A fact: hell was designed for people like me, who sever lines of hatred and circle paradoxes, becoming nothing but the nauseated four words, repeated like a half-believed promise: God if you’re there—

Then, after everything, I couldn’t even hate the very thing that destroyed me. No, I mourn after it. 

Which leaves me here —  a splendor of the universe, and knee-deep in dirt. I stood for hours – half tears, half prayer – in front of a hole I dug for lungs that would never breathe again, for a cat that flew too close to the sun. Unpracticed and unloved. Well.

You died scared and alone. That much I know to be true. Those dogs circled you like vultures, your fur still stuck in their teeth. Then when I stumbled towards you in grief, chasing refractures of hope you were somehow still alive, those canines nodded at my knees for praise – belly up, tails wagging – as if your death had been some feat of glory, and not in vain. 

I reached for you, gentle in all the ways I am not, holding you close to me, brain-mouthing mangled poetry — blood of my blood, bone of my bone — and turning to my house. The gore isn’t lost on me. I choke on communion – my body the bread, your blood the wine – and fall back on recycled instinct. God if you’re there. 

“Where are you going?”

Until then, I was walking mutilation, a shadow of my ancestry, I know. My every movement paid homage to my blood — I was the destruction this country was built upon. I was the detonation of my own body. Yet at a loss, my soul became malleable, my body caved to make room for you, and I knew then as I’d know it forever —

“To grab a shovel.”

— if you couldn’t be loved in life, I would let you find it in death. 

There is a park behind my house, and behind that park is a field where water floods too often for them to capitalize on infrastructure. As kids, my siblings and I would make believe down those wooded plains as cavemen, as makers of the universe. We carved the world in our own design — you don’t know this, but that is also human nature: to call out, to be remembered. The first recorded interaction between man and Earth was stone on stone. We sculpted ourselves into existence, tracing down timelines, we screamed until it became art.

So of course, this is where I would bury you, between the wooded land and my childhood — the inception of my innocence and the end of it. I plowed after the Earth like Moses yearned for the promised land. I was ready to build God for you even if I couldn’t believe in it anymore. I wouldn’t sever you from mercy; I would not deny you afterlife at the expense of my pride. 

I kept you close to me at my heels, an arrow’s length from my Achilles, where I crowned you with wilting December flowers, bathed in dying sunlight, and, like a prophet, promised you afterlife. I promised you hope. I promised you everything I know your ears had never heard in your life. I loved you like a God. I loved you like a human. I told you: You are not alone, then I kissed the Earth where I laid you, and buried you in stolen land. 

As I stood there, an indictment of grief, I thought of the cross I wore strung around my neck, hung tightly against my collarbones like a noose. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to relieve the necklace from its lonesome position on a dusty shelf, and my sister had called me an idiot when she saw me eyeing it. You’re not even religious. But to me it was different — I didn’t buy it as a symbol of Jesus but as a reminder that God is capable of violence. The cross – a torture device where they hung thieves and murderers, but is remembered as the throne of God. A symbol of heaven. It had always bothered me that humanity needed to kill God to have him at all. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, died forsaken in a pool of his blood, crying for his Father but was met with silence. Can you believe it? — this is the paragon of mercy.

But at the foot of your grave, it suddenly made sense. Death would forever rot on the breath of those dogs, but you chose to bear the cross of death and die loved, and I just so happened to be the instrument of mercy. And so for the first time since I bought that necklace in that dingy antique shop, I wore it like a badge of honor, I wore it as an emblem of love. I wore your crown of thorns and pulled the splinters from your skin. I was the humanity in the aftermath of death — the one that painted hands on stone walls, the one that made God in his image, the one who chose love in the face of mutilation. No longer was I the breath of faith, I was the exhale of love — the lungs of humanity. 

In the end, we will only be what we ever were: fleeting gaps of heaven, seraphim wings, and human mercy. I am not certain of much, but I know two things. When the universe upends itself back into singularity, when Earth reverts to dust, when God remakes himself — we will find each other again. And then, finally, after all is said and done, as the dogs rolled away in a city van, and my mom opened the door for my blood stained hands and tear stricken face, I think it remains eminently clear. Despite the carnage, despite the ambiguity of where the soul and body meet, despite how little we know of the pretenses of your passing:god.

You died loved, Sweet Creature. You died loved.