words of hope and joy

God is as close as the person shivering next to us.
So why does he seem so distant?

Under the cold and distant stars we tell ourselves the lie that we are not alone, that there is someone with whom we can share this sad and lonely misery that we call life. We comfort ourselves with the delusion that there is a God who is watching, that he cares, that he knows our pain, bears our sorrows, and hears the cries we make in the dark when no one is around to listen. We feed ourselves and our children this Cinderella bullshit that a fairy godmother will lead us to true love, but we know better when we allow ourselves to. We tell ourselves these lies, and they give us the pretense of comfort, of meaning, and of hope, but deep in our hearts we know the truth that weighs heavily on us from the cradle to the grave.

And that truth is this: We are alone. Alone we suffer the cruel attentions of our peers in childhood, enduring their barbed taunts with each day as their words exact their bloody pound of flesh from our self-worth, our self-respect, and our sense of identity. Alone we suffer the ignominy of adolescence and adulthood as we are thrust, ill-prepared and unsuspecting into a pool of sharks that will tear us in a frenzy once they first scent blood.

And alone we suffer the bitter fruits of maturity, as those we discover the lies that our leaders and our parents have fed us over the years, as we learn the deceitfulness of heroism and honor, as we see the might of law corrupted by small men and women with dreams no bigger than their own conceit and interests that extend no further than their own hands, and as we find that there is no love in marriage, no hope in friendship, and nothing to look forward to each day except another day of going through the motions, being crushed by disappointment and disillusion, and watching the steel bars of our cages slowly descend and take shape around us.

We are alone, and all we have to look forward to is that one day, the misery we have seen under the sun will end for us in the kind and final mercy of death.