i feel like a drama queen

And as their whispers to each other
over the confines of the internet
got dirtier and more intimate

that little bubble of hope grew
and grew and grew and grew
till it overpowered that small

little thing telling her to stay
on the ground
Because the air will only lift you higher

But she kept jumping and the
whispers
got more and more dramatic

secrets revealed and letters
released because it all made
sense in this only parallel universe

they created at the darkest hour
but as she kept jumping the atmosphere
got in her way and with a pop

she went crashing
down
to the ground.

agnosticism.

religion.

what is it?

why is it?

and how can i believe?

people like having religion around. it's something to which they can hold. it's their hope that gets them through tougher times. it explains the afterlife or lack thereof. but i just can't see what this faith is founded on.

it would be an oversimplification to say that i think god is to man merely as imaginary friend is to child. faith is more complex than that. i think a less offensive analogy would be to say that god is like language. you grow up surrounded by a presence of particular vowels, a given set of consonant combinations, and those are the ones you learn to recognize. and the older you get, the harder it is to add new sounds to that familiar set of phonetics. of course, it's possible to embrace the new sounds later in life, but it's harder. it happens less often. that's why there are chinese-speaking people who spend a lifetime trying to learn the difference between r's and l's and w's--liquid consonants, the linguists call them--but to no avail.

it's just that for me, god is that difference between those liquid consonants. i get by just fine without understanding and embracing the concept of him. it's not like the lack of god is creating some gaping void in my soul, like something's missing. but i'll confess:

i tried to believe

i can't believe

there's no way to believe

not when i have questions and i'm not buying the answers that organized religion offers.

i mean, there's the whole question of whether or not a god/higher power/supreme being even exists, and since there's no proof (and yet, maybe faith is the only proof necessary), i remain thoroughly agnostic in regards to that issue.

no, what bothers me is death. heaven. hell.

it's accepted that the body decomposes into molecules and atoms and ATP particles for use by small organisms. or it turns into ash. whichever one is chosen for the dead. but what happens to the soul?

the consciousness is life. it feels like an intangible tangle of energy, and you know what they say about energy--that it can be neither created nor destroyed. it's bothersome to not know where this consciousness goes after perception in the physical body fades from the third dimension to the zeroth dimension, where there's nothing at all--no space, no pain, no color. even the word nothing probably doesn't fit quite right, because there's no perception of absence. no existence at all. or at least that's how i imagine it.

so where does the consciousness go, anyway? one would think that it has to go somewhere. heaven doesn't really make sense to me and neither does hell. why? maybe i'm too worldly. maybe i'm too dependent on logic and proof. but the whole idea of collecting souls into two ever-increasing groups as individuals die each day just seems too inefficient to be true. i'd like to believe that when i close my eyes to die, my consciousness will leave my body and be placed inside the being of another, and when i open my eyes again i will begin a new existence. souls could be immortal that way, making experiences anew with the same ageless bundles of breath and spirit time and time again.

but there's no way of knowing if that's true, so i guess i'll never know.

and yet

there's a part of me that wants somebody to come along and prove me wrong.

Sugar High

It's no secret that her blood sugar is already sky rocketing, and she's been feeling sick since the second bag of peach rings, but nevertheless, she manages to slip one more sugar coated, manufactured, ringleted piece of hope into her smiling mouth before all the wrappers dissappear behind a veil of darkness.
She's not sure exactly why she does it, but ever since the age of seven she's been self inducing these diabetic atrocities. Every time it's a different candy- at the beginning it was candy dots; easy enough to devour just because there were so many interesting and intricate patterns in which she could eat them. She'd eat the pinks first, then the blues, then the greens, then the yellows on the first roll, then eat the next roll like a pack man- following the sugary specks around and around and around from the outside edge to the center, in a continuous stream of munching.
The most challenging candy coma by far was Mr. Wonka's supposedly ever lasting gobstoppers, which, disappointingly, were everything but everlasting and released quasi unbearable shots of ridiculously sweet powdered sugar that made her teeth hurt and her gag reflex retaliate. That time, waking up in the hospital with the dreaded IV needle lodged in her veins was a trophy of the sweet victory against her body- against all odds, she managed to force almost three hundred of the gross little orbs into her bloodstream.
Through the veil of the coma, she can hear her mother shrieking and feel her body twitching. The conversation between her parents makes her want to laugh, but the saccharine paralysis has already flooded through her face.

"I'm telling you, Richard..." her mother's voice floats through the veil in a tone that is on the edge of becoming high pitched, "...we can't be living so close to a Walgreens. Look at her! We're just enabling her by living here, with that big, red W flashing right across the street."
"We're not enabling her, Martha," There's a wary edge to Richard's generally rational and calm voice, "First off, sugar isn't a drug. And she wants to do this to herself, it doesn't have anything to do with the Walgreens...We've done everything we could. We've been throwing money at psychiatrists since these binges have started...and the insurance bills are going crazy with all this hospital talk. I can't even stand to see another IV needle. I think it's time we let the psychiatrist put her in a-"
"No. She's not crazy. There must be some reason for it. It's been happening since she was so young...and...and she can control it. It's-it's controllable...we can help her...and...it's my fault anyways, I shouldn't leave money lying around.." Martha frantically searched for and alternitave answer that hadn't already been refuted, "If a psychiatrist outside of a hospital can't help her, what will a psychiatrist inside a hospital do for her?"
"Martha," He sighed, "They'll be able to monitor her. We can't do that. We both need to work. To support her. At least we'll know that she's safe-not abusing her body...if it was drugs you would have said yes in a heartbeat."
"Drugs aren't a grey area, but sugar-sugar is...kids are just..."
"Kids like sugar, but our daughter is diabetic- that's not ok."
"She's just trying to be normal."
"Comas are normal?"

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation she had lost the urge to laugh. Behind the veil she could only picture the concerned faces of her mother and father. She wished she could writhe and protest about the decision they were making, but the darkness was becoming more and more blinding.
As the parametics arrived to the familiar address, she let herself slip into the gaping hole of her choices, the sickening taste of corn syrup and candy cocaine sticking to every tastebud.

--Julie

anaphylaxis

He had dusty freckles

and tree bark hair that stuck out behind his ears

with glassy eyes like washed-out perrier bottles,

translucent skin like incandescent light bulbs in the dinosaur lamp in his bedroom.

When he was two his mother gave him a peanut butter cookie and a glass of milk.

An hour later the doctor told her over his hospital bed

that maybe the cookie wasn't such a good idea.

His life was swallowed up by

no no, you can't have that

and

are you sure you can eat that? check the packaging, the packaging!

He liked to joke to his friends that he learned how to read the ingredients list before anything else.

While his mind day-dreamed about chocolate and crackers and tooty-frooty jelly beans, his stomach would grumble like a falling bridge, a jarring reminder of that if he isn't careful, a crumb could send him tumbling into unconsciousness.

Somehow over the years, the

watch the ingredient list

turned into

watch the road

better not try that monster drink

and

stop doing that, you'll overtire yourself

His mother was unable to bear losing him

so she strangled him with her love.

Her love was touching, at first.

a motherly-reminder of keeping him healthy

but soon that affection turned poisonous.

Her helicopter-hovering was trapping him in the mixed dimensions of

don't play football with the others, just sit and watch, i don't want you to get hurt!

and

i don't think you should be hanging out with that peter boy, he seems like he could be trouble.

So, like every hormonal, angst-ridden, parent-suffering normally-obedient upper-middle class suburbia-living boy of the 21st century, he acted out.

This afternoon, he propped himself up on his wrinkly, unmade bed. His knees stuck out as he examined a palm-sized package of M&M's, peanut-filled. His fingers flicked around the paper corners.

An itch already tugged at the back of his nose, but his nervous system was dying to know how they would taste melting on his tongue. The yellow packaging was too jarringly bright, as if they mocked his childhood years smelling of flu medicine and isopropyl from germX, a lifetime of can't touch, can't try. The voices in his mind were rising tremors, urging no no no no no

yes yes yes.

it will be sweet and there will be nothing like it.

you're done letting other people turn you into nothing by telling you you're not allowed to try

so start trying now, for fuck's sake

His fingers hesitated but did not tremble as they tore the goldenrod paper packaging and felt for a colored piece of chocolate, and on second thought, he took two. The walls of his mind were tense, shaking, screaming as he raised the candy to his lips. They fell between his teeth, ripe apples from the tree passing through the branches on their way down to the earth.

Slowly, the seismic noise in his mind calmed and faded to silence.

--Lynn and Christie