Something inside.

I did it today! I did what I shouldn’t have done, what I shouldn’t have said and what I shouldn’t have thought. The priest told me envy is a sin. The priest told me lying is a sin. The priest told me lust is a sin. Still I did it. And today I suffer from the consequence of my own darkness. I loved a man I shouldn’t have and mistook his lust for love. I lied to the world about him and today I bare the consequence of that lie. I trusted the wrong woman and today I stand betrayed, alone and angry.

The priest told me to control my anger and take the misfortunate incidents of my life punishment for the sins that I have committed and as a true Christian I bore it all in silence. And then it happened today. That final burst of anger, of an emotion so deeply repressed that it exploded. I saw him and I saw her and I saw them and all I could think of was the wrong that had been done. My mind refused to accept it as the punishment for my sin. I stood there feeble and weak as if I couldn’t do anything to punish the monsters that had ruined my life. I wanted to make them suffer; make them pay for the illness they had spread in my life.

Love is sincere and beautiful. Friendship is honest and faithful. Trust is binding and liberating. Things the priest had taught me at every Sunday mass. I hadn’t just learned them I had lived them. A moral life of a true Christian. I had followed the testaments of Christ to every word. Life was perfect. Prayer was my only job. A life that just wasn’t wrong. The priest then told us about love and marriage. The day I learned about love I wanted to love a man and have a beautiful marriage. The only marriage that I had known as a young imp was that of the lousy neighbours who fought all day long and threw things. I always thought marriage was a war. But the priest told me marriage is holy. And I wanted everything holy in my life. So I wanted love and I found a man who wanted love. And I gave him my love, but he only took what he really needed and did not find in me what he wanted. I couldn’t even blame him. The church forbade it. He wasn’t wrong. At least that is what I believed. I let him go. You had to, as my very wise spinster aunt told me that if you really love someone you must let them go. If they come back they are true else it was never meant to be, it was god’s will. So I let him go and he left. Never came back. I cried tears of sorrow without the world’s knowledge. The priest only knew. He was bound to. Confessions was the only Christian way to come clean.

Lost love I found solace in a friend. A friend who had been wronged by a lot of people and misunderstood by everyone.  She was very different from the church. A person unique and unreal. I saw some sense of sincerity and understood her darkness. Judging her wasn’t my job it was the holy God’s. She taught me a lot and I stood by her. She helped me move on. Move far ahead and she always told me to stand up and fight. Forget the man who left me and embrace the options I had. She ridiculed the church. Showed me a side to them I never saw before. Showed me how wrong they were or how wrong she thought they were. I was too lost to comprehend anything. Trust was the only thing I could bestow on her and trust is all I had to offer. And trust is what I lost in the transition.

With her being dark was easy. With her being bad was easy but being with her wasn’t easy. And the fruit of my stupidity is what I bear today. I am ousted from the church I once was loved in and she stands on the holiest pedestal there could ever have been given. As an outsider I try to remember what a true Christian should do. I must wait for god’s justice and wait is what I did. Patiently I stood outside the church everyday hoping to find that justice, to find that solace and to find the peace that I deserved. But I had none. But I got none. The man I loved didn’t love me back. The friend I trusted took my biggest secret and my good faith and turned me into a laughing stock an ostracized joke. She told the church that I had committed the ultimate sin. Of loving another man. You see Christ doesn’t accept one man’s love for another. My hidden repressed feelings were what betrayed me. My moment of passion was what destroyed me. I was a simple honest to heart Christian who loved Christ and did everything Christian. My only mistake was to find love in another man, engage in homosexuality the ultimate sin. My other mistake was to trust a sweet honest woman with my secret. Let her know my darkest secret. Her ridicule of the church convinced me that my sin was love. She twisted my reality and exposed me to win back stature in the church and I was thrown out like a useless life form.

So I did it today. I took my father’s old gun determined to make those pay for the sins they did. I went and stood outside the church on a Sunday morning. I knew they both would be there. Pretending to pray, pretending to love Christ and basking in the glory they got at my cost. I stood outside the church to fire those bullets that would set me free forever. The gates opened and my hand fastened on the trigger. As I saw them walk out I pulled the trigger.

When a bullet is fired it can pierce through anything. The first one pierced through my heart. The second through my head. And I saw those two sinister people gape at my dying body. They deserved the guilt. They deserved the pain. And I needed the liberation. I am flying into heaven now. Where my Christ will decide my destiny, my eternity. After all I was a true Christian.

Escapade

I stood on the outskirts. It had been a long day and the herd stopped to rest. They surrounded the pond and hogged down the cool water. I had had my sip and lurked on the edges of our marked territory. We were going to settle her for the next few sun sets. While the leaders discussed the future of the herd, the followers looked at them with monotonous eyes. Nothing out of the ordinary.

A young leader was rebelling against the aged ones; the minister was intervening with the leader’s wishes. They were all agitated and prepared to fight. I had been a part of it all not so long back and now as I looked at them squabbling over petty issues to assert their dominance I felt my food rise up my throat. I looked around my not so special herd. We were all slaves of one another, slaves of the rut that we were forced into. As a young one my folks told me that to survive I must fall in line as the entire herd did. We survive because we follow each other. I was never the kind to follow suit. I was different but they changed me to become one of them. The only way to fit in was to be normal. Was to be enslaved. It wasn’t a cruel life. Much better than the kind of life ill fated rebels had received. Imprisonment by the humans, being murdered by a stronger predator and worst of all being caged. At least I had a secure survival. I had food, water, shelter and a future to look forward too but I swear the open meadow that I stared at looked so tempting. When you have the gift of speed in your bloods merely standing still just doesn’t work.

It was a moment’s glimpse that caught my eye. As I looked around the boundary of our occupation I caught a glimpse of the beautiful meadow right ahead. Right as I was about to stare into its beauty I heard screams. As I turned I saw a fight breaking out between the old leader and the new one. They argued and fought as they always did. And I had to go forward to calm them down. It was my job. Unsuccessful, I managed to be thrown off. Giving up I went back to my spot. As I looked back at the open space the meadow beyond me felt a tingle in my nerves. It was beautiful. An open ground with a never ending horizon to run after and the element of not knowing what lay ahead. I felt a jolt I hadn’t before but I couldn’t leave. Leaving meant rebellion and rebels were never treated right.

Yet that meadow looked so beautiful, the grass honestly seemed greener and the fresh air was just too irresistible. But every eye of the herd was on me. They never understood me. I was the weird one. They never understood my musings about freedom. I could see right through each and every one of them.  How each of them had compromised so much to fit in that they resembled each other in more ways than one. And they considered me an outcast who was too foolish to understand that to survive you either becomes the alpha or you follow the alpha. And the alpha was no leader himself but was a slave of the herd. It was suffocating to pretend to be ordinary when every bone in my body wanted to rebel. Was I too afraid? Or was I just bound? I didn’t know. This life that I had chosen was the only life I had ever known. Our herd frowned upon rebellion and called it a sin. But why would they consider freedom to be a sin. I wanted to run away yet my legs felt heavy as if they’d been bolted to the ground beneath me. I was stuck in this herd with no friends. None of them understood me. None could be trusted. Each of them had their own regrets that they reflected unto others. The greedy ones only wanted power and food. The selfish ones took what they needed. The holy ones were above everything else and were engrossed in their own world. The foolish one’s played into the hands of the greedy and selfish ones. The sincere ones never got their dues yet kept working unquestionably. The alpha men treated everyone else like dirt and everyone was an alpha to someone else. The lowest of them all were the returned rebels- the ones who had failed to find freedom or survived from a misfortune and had to return to the herd. They were treated like dirt. Everyone saw them as the black sheep. No one respected their will to explore. As the day ended the herd began to rest. I was about to sleep when the minister approached me. I was appointed as the back guard which translated into a night watchman for the entire herd. The minister did babble on about how age had taken its toll on the alpha. When I refused to be a part of his petty politics he left disappointed. And I was left with no other alternative but to stand still and stay awake and alert. As time went by my visitors increased. One after the other followers of the young alpha came and hounded me with ill facts about the old alpha. Power struggles- they all have the same pattern. One contender who is too eager and too hungry and one contender who is too adamant. I heard them fuss about the sorry condition of the herd. I was dazed and my head began to hurt. With time their numbers decreased and I was left in my solitude. Silence never seemed better. The fresh cold air in my lungs made me feel alive. I felt that urge again to run. To run into the wilderness away from all of it. I was in a place where unknown darkness seemed more tempting that the well known life that I had.

In that moment, the temptation just overtook me. I ran! I ran away from the place where I had stood still for so long. I felt like God. I was running like I was meant too. The wind had to catch up with me. The sound of my hooves on the grass was music to my ears. I felt the air rush on my face. It tasted sweet, like the taste of freedom. I was in control; every turn I took was my own. I could feel the shackles breaking. I didn’t feel any burden no more all I could feel was liberation. I was free. Running wild like I was meant too and it felt real. It felt natural and most of all I felt elated. I ran and I ran into the wilderness unaware of what lay ahead. It was a chase and I was in pursuit of the horizon that never seemed to come closer. I was free and happy for the first time in my life. I felt like I had when I was younger when the word responsibility meant going back to mother at sunset and lying under her warm body and drifting off to sleep. I was free. As I kept running I realised that I had left herd behind. I knew I had to return in time. Yet the time I had now was mine. All mine.

-Shweta A. K.