Wages of Sin: Extreme Version

There is a moment after the apocalypse when the earth no longer trusts our footsteps.

We are hiding under the ground.

Above us, the world-systems are corrupted. Their searchlights crawl over the ruins like insects of judgment. They are looking for us, not to save us, not to name us, not to return us to the garden, but to punish us for the thing we were before we learned how to pray.

We were destined for this.

For divine punishment.

For contrapasso.

For the old law of consequence returning in the shape of our own distorted faces.

We were the deviants of thought.

The transgressors.

Raised in gardens of curious apathy, watered with forbidden questions, fed on the fruit of love until the tongue blistered. We were blunted by stubborn hearts and made tender by sins we did not understand. Sons of Adam, yes — but sons already thrown outward, dashed from heaven, exiled from the divine heart, made to wander through the aftertaste of our own inheritance.

We earned the wages of our sin.

And still we searched for music.

In flutes.

In drums.

In the counterfeit festivals of solitude.

We devoured loneliness like bread. We called it discipline. We called it depth. We called it being chosen, when perhaps we were only being hollowed out for the echo.

We walked across the waste-stretches of blinded eyes.

We searched for dreams among candles.

We fought the demons of anxiety with hands already shaking.

We broke promises we once kissed.

We carried near and dear things like relics, then dropped them in dejected lands where no bosom opened, where no door remembered our names, where the streets narrowed around us like traps built for vermin.

So we lived in holes.

We became experts of tunnels.

We learned the architecture of hiding.

Then one night, running for solace, we discovered the tunnels were fragile too.

Even the underground betrays.

Even shelter has bones that crack.

So we ran again, aimlessly, under naked nights, beneath stars that kept their distance, talking to moons like mad children with no mother awake enough to answer.

Our only skill became this:

to keep company with goblins.

To open books of ill repute.

To love what was called bad.

To steal time.

To read and write in the corners of banishment.

To become dejected.

To go astray.

To hand our faith to a shiny face and beg it to become a road.

A path.

A blind alley with one merciful exit.

We built houses on broken ground and called them futures.

We furnished them with mirages.

We planted barren dreams in the floorboards and waited for marriage songs to rise from dust.

And one day, as all cursed architectures must, the house learned how to disappear.

We left her there like a butterfly released into the heavens of oblivion — not saved, not lost, only fluttering between colors we could not deserve.

Then came the dejection of innocent intentions.

Then came the life savings lost to idols of hope.

Then came the shallow outcomes of every dream we had cast in our own image.

We watched the idols crack.

We watched their painted mouths split.

We watched the god inside them turn out to be hunger.

Time passed.

Then, like insult, came a ray of bread.

A ray only.

Not bread.

Not table.

Not home.

Just a ray.

So we cast new hopes from errand desires. We dragged ourselves past the table and washed away the bites we could not claim. We followed lessons of utmost vice, because virtue had become too expensive and mercy had begun charging rent.

Years of reading enchanted claims.

Years of buying and breathing self-fathomed blame.

Years of lying down beneath the ceiling of our own corrupted ghosts.

There we were at last:

earning the rewards of sins and struggles.

Stacking dejected claims into bridges of everlasting pain.

Calling shallow prayers from broken faith.

Speaking with mouths that no longer believed their own promises.

Do not hear our words.

Do not trust the vows we make in fear.

Do not listen to the dreams of our corrupted ghosts when they arrive at your window dressed as prophecy.

Our prayers are shallow.

Our faith is cracked.

Our candles are tired.

Our notebooks are barren.

And yet, in the dark of night, if you ever feel yourself reading the concealed ruins we left behind, pray for us.

Not because we were good.

Not because we were misunderstood.

But because the soul, even when ruined, still beats its fists against the walls that hold it.

Pray to God for the forgiveness of sins so bold that language itself becomes ashamed.

Pray that the soul may break through.

Pray that our eyes be returned.

Pray that sight come back to the blind corridors of the self.

Pray that some salvation, however crooked, however burned, however late, may reach us from beyond the brunt.

And when the times are right —

beyond the stretches of time,

beyond the madness of winning,

beyond the ceremony of loss,

beyond every house built on broken ground —

we will meet again.

We will rejoice for a moment.

We will mistake that moment for mercy.

Then shatter forever.

And call it being fine.