Write at Merge–Week 6

Dusting off my blog, here…my first try at the Write at the Merge prompt. I have wanted to write using one of these stimulating prompts since the first week of the year. Only 6 weeks late! The prompt was a stained glass window, and a line from a song, see it here

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“You’re acting like such a martyr.” I’ve heard these words too many times, and at the time it felt unjust, hurtful.   I am not a martyr. I am a sufferer–not a martyr. I cannot relate my pain to a higher religious purpose. The Catholic Church contains beauty and elegance in its places, its statues and stained glass, and beautiful monasteries with gilded libraries; volumes of history, crispy parchment pages telling of the past. But their followers are a twisted mess.

Martyrdom is for those suffused with purity. Not for the suffering—the everyday sufferers just work to go through the pain now, hoping to make it through to tomorrow, and not loathe the fact that they’re awake and alive; existing in the dirty and precious, the beautiful and profane. Life is a warped dichotomy. This is why the depressed sleep a lot. Life is difficult to swallow, even while sanguine.

St. Cecilia, the patron of music, my confirmation saint, was martyred for her faith, and her desire to stay pure for Jesus or God…not sure who. I suppose if I Googled it, I would remember. But she died a martyr, destined to be a saint, at 13. I’ve lived within years of pain, long past 13, and how could I imagine dying so I ended up a saint. Existing in a way that denied the few pleasures I can wring out of this life…I am here for the love joy I can squeeze from the rubbish.

When light shines through a stained glass window, colors paint the floor with unrecognizable glowing. The pure light, crawls along the floor as the day evaporates. But have you seen stained glass in the dark? It is opaque—walls sealing you in—blackness, trapped by an endless spider web of lead lines, a diseased grotesque surface shuts you away. Some days, the dark tortured history of religion obliterates any feeling of love I had for the beauty, the ritual and order that I used to find comforting. Such a contrived cage built for wall-less souls. All I truly want is my warm bed, with the heat-filled body of my love next to me. And some days I wish we could fade in and out of the edges of our dreams, and the awareness of each other’s bodies, and stay asleep existing on the wire between day and night, between sleep and waking–forever. That is where the essential lives, where the spirit thrives…where love engulfs, and the daily grind does not gnaw at my soul.