So I’ll just begin with an admission that I know it’s crazy and macabre and most certainly narcissistic. What I’ve been doing in my essays lately, however, is forgetting, for just a little while, that someone might read them. Just to see what happens. To push the boundaries and whatnot. And when I set aside the fear that someone may disapprove, I come up with admissions like this: I have very definite thoughts about how I want to die, and none of them are pretty.
Perhaps it’s a latent desire for purgation. I don’t know. But the point is, I wrote this, and some of you will like it, and others of you will not, and you will worry over my soul or my theology or my mental health and that’s all very kindhearted of you. Please rest assured that now, more than any other time in my life, it is well with my soul. I hope you understand I wrote this, as I’m endeavoring to write everything, just in an effort to betrue. To say a true thing in a raw enough way that a person can hear it, in this world stuffed to the brim with cliché and falsity.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt:
They say it’s easier to conjure faith in desperation, but I suspect the opposite is true, that all we hold in our trembling hands, when the earth charges up to embrace us for the last time, is what’s really there, what we really believe, what we really love, be it God or ourselves or our children or our comforts, or likely some combination of these, with salvation turning perhaps not on a choice so much as on the algorithm, on our hammered-out parameters of love.
You can read the rest of it here.
I know some of you wonder why I don’t write more. I swear that I do, only it’s not essays. There’s a novel afoot. Maybe one day you’ll read it. Until then, thanks for reading the sentence or two I hurl into this meager space.
