If I Should Seek

And if my soul should seek a light, a light that does not shine, my soul seeks because it has been told that this is radiant light. They named it holy. They said, "Move toward this," and my soul obeyed before my mind could ask why the brightness felt like warning, why salvation tasted like swallowing glass. And if my mind should seek a taste, a taste from knowledge that knows not itself, my mind seeks it for it has been breached by the murky hands of those who speak in absolutes and call their blindness vision. We hunger for the poison we're fed. We call it nourishment. We smile while it burns going down. And if my hand should reach for a branch, a grasp for the safety of a blood-stained rod, my hand reaches for it has no sight to see the branch is wrapped in thorns, to feel the safety and suffering to know that I've been reaching for this same branch every single day of my life. I feel a pulse inside me that does not belong to me. It vibrates with the frequency of others' truths, hums with their convictions, beating to the tempo of what I was taught to want. And the light they promised would reveal? It only illuminates the ruins. My soul pulses toward it anyway. Not because it's right, not because it's mine, but because the seeking has become the only proof I have that I'm still alive. Even if what I'm seeking is the very thing that's killing me. Even if I've known this all along.