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blooming

comin out during covid

By Emily BurtonPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
1

666bpm

I study my heart rate on my Apple watch almost all seconds of the day; I am possessed by and consumed with an irrational terror that my heart will stop beating— that God will look down on me and exclaim, “well, Miss Emily, your time’s up! Oh, you thought part one was bad?? HA! Your miserable expedition of anguish and desolation is only just about to begin, and this time you can do it with an even more intense feeling of bleak isolation!”

I spend all hours of the day and night hysterically panic-stricken, wondering if each heartbeat is the last I’ll ever experience, knowing that the exact amount of pulses my body will produce has already been decided for me…

that the moment that final burst of blood finishes coursing through my veins and arteries, a force with strength unimaginable will hurl my soul in a forever-falling downward plummet, plunging towards a cold darkness so bleak my bones get goosebumps and beg for warmth the rest of their lives. That with each micro-second I’m being involuntarily dictated to sit through a miserable, migraine-inducing roller coaster ride watching on repeat all the times I’ve loved wrongly— this meaning the times I’ve loved a woman. My soul will continuously suffer the pain of being slammed against impenetrable concrete, forced through ivory spikes, quenched in lavender flames, drowned in floods of acid rain, beaten with unyielding hammers the size of the observable universe. My hell will be a repeat of the biggest sin one can possibly commit: homosexuality. None of the times I’ve cheated, lied, stolen, cursed, abused, or fucked men before marriage will matter, the only important factor in determining my position after death is my one, unforgivable and nearly unspeakable sin: love. It will remain to haunt me for a never ending cycle of centuries within infinitely and actively expanding eternities.

Western culture and most religions have come to believe that predestination is a myth, a far too cynical way of viewing an individual’s position: I’m here to tell you friend that it’s not. I’m predestined to an existence worse than the average man’s hell, thanks to a sin I cannot control even if I longed to. I deserve punishment far greater than Hitler or Bin Laden or the millions of rapists and murderers and the child-molesters who’ve smiled while they fingered humanity’s most vulnerable and defenseless populations. For I loved a fellow pussy owner. I created an emotional and romantic connection with someone who shares the same arbitrary anatomy between their legs as I do. For this my soul can rot in the gaping depths of its own despair. For this my weak little heart can decay into a meaningless and useless piece of matter, unloved and cast away from our divine power. For this my beyond-earthly being can perish with the rest of history’s degenerate, un-holy and un-wholely made, vice-ridden, deficient persons. All this according to my dad at least.

So yes, every night I go to bed with an irrepressible fear that my ticker will cease to tick, that my body’s time on earth will terminate, that my veins will finally be put to rest; because when this happens, a never ending pain far worse than my already battered mental state will ensue, and I will be cast away from society and even the average hell-goers, for a damnation unimaginably brutal, incomprehensibly pain ridden, disproportionately wretched. Please heart, I sit on my knees and hands and beg and plead of you with every single entwined fiber of my obviously flawed being, please, please don’t pause beating. I’m not ready yet. Let me have one more laugh, one more cup of coffee in the mornings, one more wasted night with my friends, one more shopping spree, one more book to read, one more poem to write, one more road trip, one more nap, one more dream, one more cry, one more class period, one more class at the gym, one more fight, one more fuck, one more walk, one more photo, one more day at work, one more art project, one more swim, one more yelling from my dad, one more meal, one more song, one more dessert, one more woman to embrace. If I’m going to be cast away to a joyless and godforsaken eternal sentence, grant me my single wish of a little more time here at the Hell on Earth Hotel.

There is a set number of heartbeats left on my internal clock, and I am terrified that each beat will be my last. Thank you dad, for making death my biggest fear, and for ripping my flesh until I believed you.

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About the Creator

Emily Burton

life is so hard. all we have to show for it at the end of the day are pictures and words on paper. so might as well fill as many journal pages as possible

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