DO THEY EVEN KNOW I MAKE LOVE TO THEM? (stream of consciousness on the aftermath of religious devotion)

I couldn’t put my finger on the intensity of this feeling, where it could come from, why it was formed that way, shaped that way. I figured religious practices which were forced on me as a child had their faults and this could be one of the reasons why I couldn’t tell love apart from fascination, even devotion. It does not sound right, I know. Both things I just listed could easily pass for what one would generally call `love`. (fascinated and devoted I crawl to you and you take me, frighten me, bite me) This is not love – it’s either lesser or greater, I haven’t decided yet. But this was not the point I was going to make because it’s a rather difficult thing to get out in the open as I realised many times before, especially when I was on the edge of sacrilegious madness and no one knew. Perhaps this is the foundation of this specific type of `love` that I could never find a name for. It is you who wraps the rope around my neck and it is me who keeps quiet with the foolish gratitude that you are standing so close I can see your wrinkles deepen with every microexpression of much needed violence. They are like God perhaps, and I am nothing but mankind before and after the Flood. They never give you the boat to salvation although they make you believe they are going to take you with them, and wash your hair before actually drowning you. They give you eucharists and spit down your throat to make sure you never forget them, never get them out of your system. There is no other way for me to put this. I have favoured God (even against my will) in ways I haven’t favoured anyone. And I have loved them in ways I couldn’t love anyone else perhaps because they responded to me in ways God never did. 

To put it frankly, this narrative is much less complicated once we remove every bit of attachment to whoever the almighty would be and observe everything through an objective eye: a child built to worship a god who will forever turn his head away, who will forever frighten and ignore, a child who was forced into devotion will eventually break free from the belief that her actions will lead to nothing but metaphysical pain. On the other hand, being forced into submission to someone who potentially has your entire existence at the tip of their fingers changes the chemistry of the brain in a way no love could. You think you are saved for you escaped the clutches of your terrifying thoughts. You think there is no hell for you walked content out of the church after lying in confessions. The cuts of devotion will not bleed all over your spiritual life (no matter how you’d choose to practise your new spirituality) but on your love life for you are used to worship. And you shall worship the men that force you into devotion because this is what God did to you. There is no better replacement for a God than a man who will forever spare you the embracement of affection. Because they will make you work for forgiveness; you will sin in the simple act of breathing. You will be good for being bad and vice-versa because God strips the flesh of those who don’t know His word, and those men will strip you out of your clothes as a sign of confession and OWNERSHIP. 

In my first years of life, they raised me to act as if love is submission, that if I behave correctly I shall have the help of God, that He shall bring me the love I want. And the crux of my punishment is this: I gave up on Him so He sends me men who resemble every single bit of His violence, ones who will always make me beg for forgiveness.