I’m going to die here.

Who knows how long I have been in here. “Here” being a square of white light, an artificial womb, a state of stress-induced insanity. No way to judge the minuteshoursdays when it’s light all the time. Constant light pouring into my pupils like a steady Niagara Falls; even closing my eyes does not shut off the flow. This is what it is like to go blind. Be Thou my vision. I would have thought this is heaven if I wasn’t positive I didn’t deserve it. I broke apart the spectrum from the solid field of non-color. Here was green and blue and red, pixels mating to become white light. Dust motes behind my eyes, inside my eyes. I want to scratch them out but I can’t recall arms or fingernails or anything that existed below my eyeballs, overloaded with light. There is a customary cycle of sensory numbness and pain; I begin to welcome the pain even though I didn’t know where it originates, just so I know I am still alive and not a floating jumble of optic nerves. Sometimes there is cold metal and the pinch of needles; sometimes there is alcohol and the smell of burning skin, sometimes the acrid bile stench as their experiments churns my stomach. The colors come to hover in my peripheral during these times, watching and shimmering with encouragement and sympathy. Stay with me. Don’t leave me alone.

Lonely was how junior high was. I never felt alone until the day I realized the man I loved--as much of a man as a soft-stubbled thirteen year old can be--would never hear my poems of adoration, get near enough to let me rest on his shoulder, touch his scalp through his spiked hair. I never knew his real name, but what he was called was Rex. King--of what, besides my nightmares, where he tumbled off cliffs into oblivion?

That night I sank low into the rapidly chilling bathwater, ducked my head under and opened my eyes to the suds and asked God why I liked other boys; why I locked myself in bathroom stalls and prayed to the ceiling tiles when my mind turned against my faith. But He, too, had abandoned me.

Out of habit I recite some prayers even though I have stopped expecting answers. Even if I am an abomination, I was made in His image. He did this to me and I have devoted my years to finding out why, interpreting his silence as a sign that I am still failing Him. My Father, Our Father. The white light flickers for a moment, casting a sharp wedge of black across my snow screen world. It startles me, and the color-motes jump out of the way. There’s an annoying sensation like my vertebrae are being stacked up and knocked down like children’s blocks. I know I should be punished. The white light burns brighter, as if in agreement. Forgive us our trespasses. Thine is the way of light.

My body was created and destroyed, systematically, clinically, repeatedly. After a while I regarded tubes forcing oxygen and foodpaste into me, a ping ping of a heart monitor. I could turn my head from side to side, though I was still blind. There was a sound like a distant motor grumbling, and darts of shadow as the white light was shredded.

Everything’s supposed to change after junior high. This transition into new life--deemed “adulthood” is little more than binge-drinking parties and fruitless hours of studying. First high school, then college...both were hurdles obscuring a promised life that is real. As I tentatively wet my feet in college life I tried to float between the unyielding sects every freshman falls into: the partyers and the nerds. But I was too unmotivated to step up to the academic standards; too socially inept and bored with beer pong to attend too many jock-and-jockette mixers. And so I slipped into the Vortex, which I had fallen in and out of like a troubled sleep. The Vortex is what happens to people who, instead of being consumed by the mania of college, diametrically repel it. Like a homeless degenerate, I collected the things unwanted--the people unwanted--the other people drifting aimlessly about the dark expanse. Once inside, the black hole consumes you, and those outside can not see in. They talk to the Vortexers like they would to an addled and wealthy grandparent--when they needed something, or had run out of enjoyable things to do.

Not to say that I related to others of the Vortex; my only pained relationship had been with the Lord. But I had no right to be choosy. Anyone who passed my aimless orbit pulled me in, miniature vortexes in themselves. I ended up with everyone who was refuse. Everyone had been reincarnated “mature,” which meant cramming their orifices with beer and sex. Rex halted me mid-orbit, like a tether for a floating astronaut. I had followed him though high school and college, working up my nerve to get to this point, to confront him and my feelings at the same time.

World...without...end. The more consciousness returns to me, the more I feel that my life is disintegrating. I don’t feel noble. I am not a martyr. I hadn’t accepted death, my eternal damnation. Coward.

As my knuckles collided with Rex’s face, I had two thoughts. 1: I get to touch him at last. Even in this sick adrenaline-fear-fury moment, I imagined I had time enough to feel a shaved beard under my fist, and smell fabric softener linger as his body arched backwards, but didn’t fall. 2: He is the reason for my suffering, why the Lord suffers for me.

The rumbling I heard turns out to be voices, telling me to live. The white light is fluorescent, not divine. I hear my own breathing for the first time and hate its cruel and mocking rhythm. I feel as though I have suddenly awoken from a falling dream, and clutch at the place under my stomach, where Rex’s bullets were removed.