#6

i've never really been able to talk about being dead. words kind of stop at the threshold. i think that's important. i think it's because if i could talk about it i would be a prophet and i am not a prophet. my life is not the sort of road map you'd want to give to people who are trying to figure out how to be a person; it's more of a counterexample full of cul de sacs and wastelands and places better not discussed. let's leave it at that.

so when i tell you that i preferred being dead, that i was happier there than here, will you understand that there is no need to call the cops? i'm not telling you i'm planning to off myself or anything. that would be rude. i am here for a reason, i suppose, just like you are. and i can accept that the reason can be secret and i can accept that the reason can be small and i can accept that the reason can be a puzzle i don't ever solve. but it is hard to accept that i am still here.

the world is a prison to the believer. words like this are the reason i am muslim.

when you come back from something like that, when you've been dead and you can't explain where you were or what you felt and then you're slapped back into the world like a fish flapping on the deck of a boat let me tell you you go looking for other people, anyone who understands what you're feeling without you having to reach into yourself and pull out another tangle of words that sound stupider and stupider each time you say them-- like when you hand a firstborn child into the arms of its mother who thought she knew what love was when the child was in her belly but as she sees her baby for the first time she realizes that she had no idea what love was, but that is a person and this said be and made the universe, and like the universe were made of exploding white hot suns full of that love

and by that point you just sound like a crazy person. and everyone is backing away from the crazy person.

so you stop trying to tell people what it was like to be dead. because you're not a prophet. and you sound like a crazy person. God who loves you with the intensity of a universe full of expoding suns has placed a hand over your mouth and filled it with crazy so you can't tell anyone because you are no prophet. so you try to accept this and move on.

but prayer is hard. prayer is very, very hard. because you and God are not really getting along lately. praying feels like banging your fist against a door that won't open. it feels like shouting at a waterfall, like your mind trying to convince itself that the blackness of the sky is endless but seeing only blackness, only flat, only a nothing that is far too small for all that everything.

and God sends you butterflies and cool breezes and a cricket to sing to you while you're typing and you put these things in one hand and heaven in the other and it is impossible to draw the conclusion that they in any way balance one another out. so you pray, dutifully. you press your head against the ground and fill it with arabic and try not to hope that God will touch you in your prayer, will hold you in his everything, will knock the breath out of you and finally let you see Him again.

you can tell yourself that God is everywhere but it is the night sky again-- you know it is true but it can not and will not scrunch all that truth into your tiny, tiny mind.