bone marrow transplant
“if i wasn’t born into this family, i’d have and want nothing to do with these people, in fact they’re exactly the sort of people i’d hate.”
i thought this often growing up, and it has come true.
if things go poorly and all else should fail, an allogeneic transplant would be the best bet for saving my life.
my family members would be the best bets to find matches.
i’m not terribly attached to living even when “healthy” i’ve desired my own obliteration for so long and now it’s being presented to me.
yet i feel there are places i must go, people i need to meet and experiences i owe to myself
still i would sooner die than ask my family to save my life.
how did it come to this? i am a reasonable person, i am exhausted by grudges, i do not believe in them, yet when the subject of my “guardians” comes up as i think about amends i must make and affairs i should sort out, i only feel fury.
if i am to trust myself and give us the benefit of the doubt, then it must be the case that they thoroughly earned my contempt beyond my capacity to forgive.
every day a new remembrance that breaks my heart.
when i was a child and still a person, i quickly grew to hate the church, the embodiment of hypocrisy that it was.
now i would call myself the very embodiment of a worse hypocrisy and still i am unable to relinquish my contempt.
my mother would sometimes say “i’m waiting for the church that you will one day establish.”
she meant it in earnest.
in the naivety of youth i had grand designs of acceptance, community, fellowship, everything that was promised.
now my machinations only center around maiming and destruction, God’s own wrath brought down upon my village.
i often day dream and imagine what sorts of conversations i would have with mother and father, my aunts, my grandparents.
it always breaks down and turns into me howling bitterly at their faces.
i envision myself grabbing their necks and screaming.
i hate them.
hatred outlives the hateful.
look what you’ve done, look what you’ve turned me into.
i may never return to burn the village as the proverbial child who never experienced its warmth, and i will never return home as the prodigal son
but i will be immortalized in hate.
i hate you.
all of you who call yourselves my family.
if there is another life you will know my wrath there; and if not, may i still return as a vengeful spirit to torture you in this one.
it was you who killed me in the only way that matters.
post script
"For my part, as I went away, I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge when he has not, while l, having no knowledge, do not think I have."
(Apology, 21d)
