"What is your real name?"

"I received my name from God. But to me, who opposed God, there is no longer a name."
-Scar, Fullmetal Alchemist

I look you in the eye, my Lord, and I ask how it is that this little lamb has strayed so far from your path?

I hold no love for you under any name, the Christian God, called Him and Yahweh and Jehovah and Jah and Jesus Christ himself. I watch as fools lie down their lives for a barren truth, devoted and deceived. At least I credit those darling pious... truthfully, we're quite alike. They have the power to commit, as do I. I wonder sometimes, for although I am no follower, if I am even more of a believer than that man in his priest-cassock (his cock still sore from the schoolboy).

I refuse to stand on the sidelines between the sinners and the saved, I hate all of you who claim to believe but do not follow your own religion! I would rather bend my head to expose my neck than quaver in a half-bow, dancing between "spiritual" and "agnostic", these terms which were made up for the weak and indecisive.

I am a creature who has fallen into the cycles of betrayal, lust and gluttony. I have felt madness on a level which most will never glimpse. I have held refuge with the rest of the tempters and devils and I am risen now, my blinding halo has returned.

My name is Abaddon. My name is Apollyon.

And I am the angel who will open the gate to the abyss, the abyss which will bring about the destruction of mankind.

A moment of retrospection

There is a girl in a red dress standing at the far left of my Aunt Nicole’s wedding photo. All of the women are wearing the same color, but her dress is different, with wide shoulder straps and a fully covered chest. There are four other attendants to my beautiful Aunt in white, and each of them has had their hair styled in an elaborate up-do for the occasion. The girl on the left wears her hair down, and the wind has caught it. Her hair is the color of sodden straw and it blows back behind her like a sheet. Her hands are holding a single white flower, and are encased in long white gloves. The entire outfit is meant to make her look like a miniature grown up, but not a real one. In a few years, this girl will be too pretty to stand at the far left. This girl will be on her dirty knees in torn fishnet stockings on hard gravel in the Florida Everglades, and she will be drunk and giggling, and there will be piss on the ground behind her. But not now. Right now, the girl on the far left wears her spotless white gloves and holds the flower that her Aunt in white gave to her, and her hair billows back into the wind, and she looks into the camera like she’s never seen it coming.

"You will suffer," she said.

I was a child who always kept her nose in a book, a pen in her hand and her eyes cast firmly downward. I didn't have many friends at the tender age of thirteen, and I knew that. I rarely bothered to style my hair the way my peers did, and I never wore make up because I wasn't quite sure how to put it on. I wore sweatshirts in the Florida heat to hide the scars and the open lacerations on my arms.

The woman who taught my ninth grade religion class was a strange one indeed. She had wide, protuberant eyes that seemed too big for her small face, somewhat greasy skin which she tried to cover with different shades of light brown foundation, and a painfully thin body which reaked of anorexia. She had a small daughter who she occasionally brought to class with her, and her classes were each started with a prayer. She created a safe haven for me in that school where I did not fit in quite yet, and I loved her for that.

She would frequently keep me after class, and we would talk about the lesson, her religion and my life. After a rather depressing class on the lives of the prophets of her Lord, I had walked over to her desk in the corner and asked why it was that those given gifts by God were so tortured. She looked up at me, and those large eyes were so sad when she took my hand and said, "Yes, I'm sorry. You will suffer."

Your face on the pavement and my star in the sky.

You were just a boy with the keys to a Cadillac then, your breath tasted like an ashtray and I thought it made me infinitely cooler to have kissed you. Your shoes were black and the laces had anarchy symbols printed in a rather orderly line. I didn’t mention this to you because they looked pretty rebellious, and I liked that. You wore bracelets and chains and you were a drug addict, even then. You’re worse now, I think, but the track marks were obvious on your arms at the age of seventeen and that’s why you wore long sleeve shirts under our Catholic school uniforms.

Everyday after the bell rang, you’d smile and ask me if I wanted to go down the block until we were the required fifty yards from campus. I always said yes because that was the thing to do, and you lit my cigarettes for me because I didn’t know how to. I didn’t even know how to smoke them properly but the menthol ones made my mouth tingly and I guessed that was a good thing. I think I was probably sort of pretty then, with plastic barrettes in my wavy gold hair and safety pins through my ears. I didn’t think so, not really, but looking back, anything’s better then where I am now. My arms were covered in scars then, some open and some closed and some faded, but they were mine. These were somewhat obscured near the wrist with about fifty plastic ringlets of varying colors. I hated taking them off at night, so I’d wear them all the time, even during the shower, but after that they’d irritate my skin and I’d just have to ignore it.

I was taking a lot of pills then. Every Wednesday I went to the psychiatrist down the road and she gave me prescriptions which she called “scripts” and I would just agree to it all. My dad came in and would read magazines in the waiting room in the beginning, but later he started staying in his truck with his wireless internet and laptop computer. I was taking Topomax for mood stabilization and Wellbutrin XL because I was depressed. I didn’t understand the point of trying to treat the bipolar disordered with drugs meant to both calm my mood swings and induce them, but I didn’t care. They made me skinny. Everyday I ate less and everyday I watched the numbers drop on the scale. My pants were so baggy and I was in love with the feeling. I lost thirty pounds and then forty, really, and that’s where it all started.

I used to carry a compact mirror in my purse so that I could look at myself and see how terrible I was breaking out, how bad my eyebrows were growing in, and how frizzy my hair was. Anyway, you, the Cadillac bad boy, you broke my compact mirror one day. We were sitting on a balcony at a rich person’s mall at night and the concrete was cold on my ass through my skirt. You took it from me and you smashed the mirror, and I laughed a little, and you took the pieces of glass and pushed them into your skin. You dug them across and I just looked at you and told you that you were a wimp, there wasn’t even a mark. You looked me in the eye and said, “Just wait.” Thirty seconds later there were rivulets of blood running down your arms and I, I was impressed.

Your girlfriend or something like that was there, and I don’t think she ever liked me, but it wasn’t as if I’d kissed you then. No, I kissed you a lot later, and I listened to her talk for hours about you. It wasn’t as if I loved you or even really liked you like that, no. I just wanted to feel something, so I kissed you in the parking lot next to your Cadillac, and you put your arms around me, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you again.

You know the truth, don't you?

Every time you say "I have no regrets", I know you're lying. Because regrets are guilt, and we all have guilt. My therapist says that we can rid ourselves of regret by asking for forgiveness.

But I can't say "I'm sorry" in a way that will make you believe me.

Why I feel I need counseling.

this was her life, this was a little girl in a magical place and this was a young woman in a dreamland and this was an old lady trapped in a different era, looking back on all of these things. this is the saddest that you'll ever get - wrinkled and brown and hairy in places you shouldn't be, eyeing the oldoldold photos of a straight porcelain nose and cheeks that blush in a way poets called 'prettily'.

but the poets are all dead, the poets are born dead inside, that's the way we write and that's the way we see and that's why we can't smile like the rest of society. we don't fit in right, we don't mesh on the edges - we have eyes and brains and teeth and legs and arms like everyone else but they all are programmed so simply, so rigidly. party tonight and trust given to everyone and appearances are everything and we poets are stuck in the back of the room, staring at the ruins of what was once a human girl or a human boy and is now just a slut in everyday clothes.

and we stare at you and we judge you and i judge you harshest of all because i am a person, not a girl, i am a person with nothing left to live for. i have lost hope and i have lost passion and i have lost fuel and there is nothing driving me now. i am coasting on empty. i am on auto-pilot, some days go better than others and some days are worse, some days hurt more than anything i've ever experienced and all i can think of is the brown eyes that never closed even after the life fled from behind them and i think of my own brown eyes and i wonder how soon the life will be gone from behind them and i know it's not long, not long now. i have been feeling the emptiness for days for weeks for months for years and years and years, since the first pair of brown eyes closed.

brown eyes like my father's brown eyes like mine brown eyes like my girl's and brown eyes like shit like dirt like fallen leaves and fucking autumn and nothing good ever comes from brown eyes. the heroines of all the best books are blue-eyed. green-eyed. some are majestic some are more than anything some have silver eyes and gold eyes and some call it hazel and some are obsessed with pretending their stupid plain eyes are something better than what they are but we all know, at the end of the day, they're just fucking brown.

last night I rode bareback during a lightning storm in the pitchblack summer winds and I felt alive

The sky is black but the clouds are rolling in gray waves over the west, and the flash white-blue of lightning streaks behind them like a sin. I can't help but smile in this moment, and this is everything. Florida summers feel like torture, the way the afternoons melt by, honey in the sunshine. The way the mornings disappear in a heat haze of barely opened eyes and blankets kicked off and sweat behind your knees. But the summer nights in Florida are something else entirely...

The way the breeze blows through your hair, you feel naked. It's a warm breeze and that changes everything. And Florida is so flat, you can see everything, the way I can see the lightning in the distance like it's a picture-book held under my nose, it's that close.

My hand traces down your mane, braided tight and black against my favorite shade of copper brown. No saddle tonight, just your skin, that perfect coat, against my cheap jeans. It feels like we're together, now, the way we were together when the judges decided we were the best in the nation in your specialty. I remember the announcer, remember the way I fell onto your neck, because gravity was nonexistent and the sense had left the world and oh my god, it was just you and me and we did something impossible.

We made a dream come true. My dream. Our dream, maybe. But maybe I've had it wrong this whole time, my little sparrow. Are you a Jinn, perhaps? Hiding your flaming eyes somehow? How else have you given me dream after dream, with so little in return?

So last night, let's call this an abstract dream, let's call this being alive. Because that's how I felt, my lungs actually moving and my heart beating, wet and strong and this. is. everything. And sometimes I forget that I've taken riding lessons for years, and I forget that you're by far the most well-trained horse I've ever ridden, and I realize that if I just let go, we're fine. We move without thinking and we agree on everything and there is nothing better than being with you. Nothing.