OP-ED: You Can’t Kick Me Out of a GSR in a Way That Matters

The first fire was the fire of falsehood, “when we do not fulfill what we promised.” Next came the fire of avarice, “when we place our love of worldly riches before the riches of Heaven,” then the fire of discord, “when we do not fear to offend the souls of our neighbors even in superficial matters,” and the fourth the fire of irreverence, “when we think it nothing to despoil and defraud those weaker than ourselves.” The four rolodexed through my mind as I made my daily trek to the dining hall. Interactions all doomed from the start. Damned by their own inertia, they collapse in on themselves and follow this tragic pattern. 

Love is the mystical dew that I must harness to exempt myself from this cycle, but love is also the dihybrid cross of a Klein bottle and a Prince Rupert’s drop, which is to say that it’s circuitous, fragile, and difficult to depict in three dimensions. 

Is it that God chooses to punish those who have sinned against him by consigning them to an eternity of suffering, or that God never turns away his face from man, and never casts man away from himself, that he casts no one into Hell and is angry with no one? Is Hellfire simply the overflowing love of God, burning only those who cannot return it?

How can I absolve myself from jealousy’s vile putrefaction? How can I stop reading into our semiannual perfunctory glances? Will we find each other in the afterlife? Will I find him in another? Did I ever even find him? 

My favorite psychiatrist wrote that “Jealousy makes [us] aware of [our] need for love and security, which is often humiliating because most gay men are convinced that their emotional needs will not be met; if they rely too much on one other person, they will again be injured or rejected as they were in childhood and adolescence.” I think during my birth the OB-GYN engraved this quote into my cornea as if I was a new iPhone. 

That’s it. I must surrender to the repugnance. It’s the only way out. 

When we deny that it exists, we place ourselves at risk! 

I realize I am damned to this narrative. But the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end, for they know that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside.

The torture is infinite, but the infinity outside of time might be the same thing as no time at all. Many gnostics of our time have realized this. That I bestow this message is nothing more than a predetermined most-efficient path of knowledge transference. 

Go to the ends of the Earth for you // to make you feel my love. 

She was so real for that. 

Sure, kick me out. But you can’t do it in a way that matters.