Genesis

"God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light; 
and God saw the light was good, 
and he separated light from darkness. 
He called the light 'day', 
and the darkness 'night'. 
So evening came, and the morning came; 
it was the first day."
Genesis 1.1 


This was what happened before light was separated from darkness. There was a rocking ocean inside a pupa. There was a rosy lunula covered with draining magma. There were 9 months named after the gestation period. Then there arrived a new face. And there was no cord attached. There was a place to rest in. And there was a factory to mold this new face. There were labors who worked through words and not by hands. There was a routine. There was monotony. And there was a long haul. There were brilliantly molded faces that once fled a much bigger pupa. There was the anatomy of earth. And there was a God, or so they said, and He said, "Let there be light," and here I am. A part of me was born, and another part of me, too. 

From a very young age, I've been living with the kind of control that can push me to a higher realm of consciousness and achievement; the kind of control that one can lose easily. The kind of control that if once is lost, it takes almost a lifetime, or so that's how long it felt like, to learn to regain. If humans could live to a hundred years old, I would at least be over 200; a century for getting by in darkness, and another for living in light. 

It's funny how ordinary it is when it rains on someone else, but when it rains on us, it always feels like a hurricane. There was a time when I was poured over, and the sun never came out. I lived in darkness, and darkness I became. How inequitable it was, that everyone could bathe in sunshine and yet I was thrown into this giant whirlpool. It made me so angry, because that's not what I thought I deserved. I stamped on the ground, spit on the grass, shot down the swallows; nobody should reap what I couldn't. I threw tempers at my parents, I bade my sister do the things she was unable to, I gave my friends the cold shoulder. I painted galaxies on my skin and gashed myself ruby bracelets. I drank like there was no yesterday and smoked as if tomorrow didn't exist. And that's how much I hated myself. Him. Her. Them. It. And because I sang and danced and smiled, they thought it had done me no injury, and because all that I wanted was all that I kept pushing away, they thought I enjoyed being on my own; I was never really where I was, I was only inside my head. There were times when all that I wanted to do was to tear a hole in my world and escape. There were times when I couldn't hold back from climbing out of the balcony and draw a close to my endless insatiable tendencies of self-destruction. Sometimes when everything falls apart, it makes you want to fall, too. I was out of control, I was losing it. I was drowning in this whirlpool; it was swallowing me whole, and nobody was there to drag me up because I'd pushed them all away. 

I remembered how I was full of love, and nobody wanted it. So I molded it into bricks and built four thick walls around myself, and so, inside was a place where I lived all alone. I decorated these walls with mirrors and hung lousy thoughts all around. It wasn’t a nice place to spend time in, but I was protected. 

All this time I thought I had it good in this safe house. But things that are built on broken things will eventually crumble. I forgot what it felt like to feel, and I forgot what it felt like to be around others. I thought I was better than them just because I've been in the dark, and I poured seawater in their wounds just to watch them cope with the pain I was in, but it was mainly because I thought they didn't have any wounds. I was so jealous of those who had everything they wanted, of the things they took for granted. And I thought I should also be granted what those people had. But it never occurred to me that they didn't deserve any of those, either. 

It took me a thousand sleepless nights to hold myself together. It took me a dozen painkillers last night to kill the earthquake in my head caused by insomnia. And the side effect made me tremble like a puppy in the winter rain, and my world rocked in consciousness and control. It brought me back to the time when there was no light and no darkness. In the time in between, I closed my eyes and thought about it all. I thought about the beginning and the transformation, and how I finally got here. It wasn't the ground's fault that I'd been mistreated. Neither was the grass', the swallows', my parents', my sister's, my friends'. Ever since I was little, I've always asked myself, "What's the point after all?" Well, maybe this is the point. Maybe life is about wandering off to darkness, and spending a long time and a hell lot of energy to finally see the light, over and over again. I always thought the strong ones were the people who could still stand up in the dark after falling over and over again, who could still survive in it, but now I think the strongest ones are the people who can turn darkness into light, and revel in the sanctity of the dual existence of happiness and sadness in life. And how do we do that, how do we see beyond darkness? Forgive. Forgive yourself. Forgive him, her, them, it, and close your eyes and become the light.