I’ve decided there’s a god, I think, because, and for the reason that they’re fucking with me. They’re fucking with me in ways I’m incapable of comprehending. On some four-dimensional shit, invisible hand up my ass and not even playing with my prostate, just spinning me around like a platter balanced on the astute finger of a mustachioed waiter. What is it You want me to see? What is it I am seeing?
My houseplants aren’t meant to grow in a room where sunlight comes from only one direction. Their leaves, under a big wide sky are meant to tilt casually throughout the day, a wave in slow motion, and then reset for the morning, poised like satellite dishes in the direction where the sun will rise with the intent of capturing as much sunlight as possible at all possible hours. In my living room, they know light only from one direction and so they spend their days quivering like a tuning fork toward that primordial source. Only for me to stagger in after my own quivering day and tilt them away. Quarter turn your pot, fuck your tilt, I won’t let you topple over. All their work in vain. They don’t know it is bad for them to go looking only in one direction. This helping hand of mine must befuddle.
What am I tilting toward? Am I too animal to notice that it’s not meant for me? I see shiny, sexy, enticing and all my leaves shiver. I want and I want and I want but so rarely do I get. God is fucking with me. God is quarter turning me in my pot. God knows that I can’t see my conditions are unnatural, which, no offense God, but I actually really can and do. All day long I lament the horrible context I have been thrust into, this godless forest of 401k’s and stock options and crawling pavement, advertisements for Peebee which could be a soda or a streaming service or a health insurance provider which will deny all of your claims. This structural world is unnatural. I am working with what I’ve been given. I never asked to be plopped in a room with two windows when I’m meant to be stretching, growling, winking beneath a sky of blue bounty.
I never asked for this. I’m making do. Doing what I can to make.
So, the question of course, the thing that idiots have been asking since the beginning of the stupid thinking mind: is God keeping me upright? When I am steered away from something, is it because I was running full tilt in the only direction I thought available? Was I teetering into the big topple? God,—are you fucking with me or is this love?
I think I might be mad either way. I don’t ask for help. Don’t want it! Suffering is next to godliness. The worst things that happen to me encrust my skin, toughen my resolve like leather. I don’t pray to a god–there are only a few that I know by name. Can’t I just tilt? Behold the boldly blind fool: can’t I just scramble like a madman toward the next thing that bends my spine as a stem bows toward the floor in bashful prayer?
And god, and this is where it gets ugly, and this is where I get angry in a righteous way, because God, or god, why and why if you can wrap your fingers round my life and hit me with the quarter turn, why and why if you see me locked in this room I cannot fathom escaping, why and why if you can see my captor and know that it is me, have you almighty YOU let me drown so many times? Why care now, idiot?
I’ve suffocated under the suction seal of this life, God. I’ve laughed through tears at gaping wounds in the floor, Lord. I’ve desecrated this skin for the sake of divinity, Fucker In The Metaphorical Sky. Why now only now that I’d like to choose goodness do I feel your big, fat hand skidding across the craggy face of my life, skimming the surface of my desire and ripping it apart like picking at loose threads to tilt me toward some Thing I cannot see?
This presence that hovers around me now. Is that You, Dipshit? Is it—god forbid—me? Please don’t let it be Me. Do I really have to call myself God? That’s fucked, Big Dude. If it’s just me in control or slack-jawed out of control, that’s fucked, My Man. Why do I turn away from the things I claim to want? I didn’t know I was allowed to change my mind.
If it’s me who is the invisible hand, then I must beg and beg the question again and then again: where was I? Where were my own tiresome fingers to guide me toward a betterness? I’ve known better. I know better and decide to know less.
Maybe I should say–I know I am not God, only that I’ve Been god and I cannot see everything but I can feel divinity and I know when to rend my Self with the quarter turn and I don’t. Sometimes I don’t. Am I fucking with myself or is this love?
Is this devotion or blindness?
I am become idiot. I ask and ask until I’m dead and never once do I listen to the answer.
Too busy running, too greedy tilting, but there–there! On the horizon! I see the sun rising now. It’s a calling and the only one that makes sense. Every inch of me quivers with instinct. This time, I think, this time it has to guide me from the one-dimensional room.
This time, I am seeing. This time I’m a just God, aren’t I?
In the end and at the end, I might turn away anyhow. Just a quarter. Is that fucking with myself or is it love?
i’m bending to the floor now / i’m dreaming, don’t worry
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love this, and yes, it’s love as long as you choose to be a loving god 💖
Probably my favorite thing I've read all week. I relate hard- I actually wrote a poem about rotating houseplants in 2017 called "Tilt" and it meshed with this essay in my mind. Stunningly blunt. Well done.