My Darling God

Prologue

Benjamin

I am afraid of being too crude—of sharing too much.

I don’t want to hurt anyone. If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry.

I’m so fucking sorry. I’m trying to make myself digestible, but everything is muddy; it happened too fast—all at once—and somehow took forever.

I don’t know how to rip it all apart and make it easy.

Nothing about what has happened to me, or the things I have done, has been easy.

It has been nasty and tragic and obscene. I am backwards, an upside-down boy.

Patronized—belittled by my age and my lack of experience with love and loss, the great triumphs of being old in a world that only favors what has already happened.

Believing you are wise does not make you so.

No amount of tragedy I have faced will make me appear more intelligent in the eyes of my peers.

But I feel the weight of what I have been through—the things I was forced to learn too young—and I am suffocated by it.

And from under that weight, I cannot tell you what memory or event caused me the most turmoil.

All I can say for certain is that there is always something that terrifies me more than the last. There is always another moment of free fall where I think to myself, this must be it.

Surely no one is expecting me to get back up after this one.

The sad truth is that they always will. It is required of you to stay alive until living is torn from our wilting hands.

That is the worst thing about being alive: you are never able to decide to die.

I have wanted to die more times than I can count.

The weight of living is far too heavy for me to carry; I am not strong enough.

I want relief, and I am tired of feeling guilty for it.

I am tired of feeling pathetic for being weak.

In nature, I am a weak boy. I always will be, and I find beauty in that.

In being sensitive, overwhelmed, and nervous.

Because it is natural. Because it is familiar and safe to feel like a feather just now reaching the concrete.

A slow, torturous fall. A soft crash. This is who I am, who I have hidden because I felt vulnerable.

And like a hypocrite, I am also tired of aging, tired of running full speed toward something I do not want. Death, loss, heartache—memories fading, and time slipping away drip by drip. The anxiety of it suffocates me, and it did back then too, even at the ripe age of being a child.

Reality is cruel and demanding; I am not ready to pay the dues required of you after birth.

I did not ask for this. I did not ask to be awoken and thrown onto a limb.

I did not ask to be alone, angry, and clawing my way through adolescence—screaming and bleeding through my youth.

Everything I touch takes on a new shape; everything I let go of is crumbled and covered in tears and blood from fighting to keep it within reach.

I am small, yet too big, awkward in my own body, and expected to succeed and be pleasant.

There is nothing pleasant about a boy learning how to be a man when there is no one there to teach him how to be one, how to keep the ghosts away.

At the end of the day, I just want to be seen.

I desperately need to be heard. I want people to know that I am here, living and breathing and fighting.

All of this—it has to have been for something.

And it might be crude, and it might hurt people, and I’m sorry—but please, somebody hold these thoughts, shoulder these burdens for me, even briefly.

Hear my cries and please, for once, choose me.

An upside-down boy. A feather just now reaching the concrete.

Find me here. Find me deep in the recesses of my own mind and love me.