There is pain. I did not expect that.
Something alive lives inside me, something I did not expect, and it is tearing holes in me, trying to escape. I fear it. I do not know what it is. I do not know what of me will remain should it win free.
Easier, perhaps, to drive it back, to wrap myself with familiarity, with habit. Would that be a comfort, anymore?
I thought once I served God. I knew it, and it guided me, my actions, my purpose. Now... now I do not know. Is this *God* I serve, or the maneuvering of lesser beings? How can I know? Because conscience is broken, at war with itself, and what I feel, what I see, what I hope that I know in the core of my being is at odds with things I took to be true.
I am fissured, damaged, fractured. I feel the world as if through a prism, in clean and partial pictures, part of the spectrum of the whole. I can *remember* that whole... but I cannot reach it.
There is guilt, and I do not know why. There is an anger so deep I cannot see its edges, and a hatred whose cause I cannot find. I want to hurt... and to be hurt.
I cannot feel anything, anymore, except these things. The rest is a parody of remembered emotions.
I am consumed.
-----------------
I am consumed.
Emotions rip through me, a bonfire on dead leaves. Was that me, those crisping, smoking shards that made a soul? Could I have been that... shriveled, that mutilated, that *small*?
I thought I served God, that I did his work among the most foul of all Creation. I deceived myself, and wrought horrors. Comes the guilt, then, and I turn on myself with claws: that which has erred, which is weak, must be punished...
Rings of Fire burn my hands away.
There is forgiveness. I had forgotten that; hatred colors everything one feels, and one is incapable of love when one hates oneself so totally. I am loved, and I love, again. There is still anger. There is yet passion. The deadness -- that is gone, in the orbiting fires.
Feel the fires... see the curling edges of the soul... oh, see what emerges, white and clean and bright as newborn suns. Lesser, and greater, too, the debris consumed in rebirth.
There is a pain, and I revel in it.