whataredaysfor's Journal

I have arrived here through no choice of my own. Last month my friend Jason, my only friend, with whom I had grown up, schooled, laughed and cried, was involved in a car accident. He was driving past a school and had to swerve to avoid a child who ran out into the road, and ended up ploughing into a tree, suffering severe brain damage. His parents are catholics and will not remove him from life support, but I know his soul has already moved on. What lies there, surrounded by wires and flashing trance boxes, is but a husk of meat and bone, redundant eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling. We found out later that the little boy outside the school, who he gave up his life to save, has leukemia. I don't know how to feel about this. I wish I could go back in time and tell Jason not to swerve, that this child's life wasn't important, that it would be a mercy to crush him under wheel. But how often do we have thoughts like that, and what damn good do they do? So now I'm here. I am like a dam, allowing the effluence of my soul to build up until the pressure becomes unbearable and I crack and crumble and cry, but I have no one to release it. This is where I hope you will come in, oh gentle reader, I must purge myself and unleash what is inside me. I do not wish you to wallow or drown in what bursts forth - it is purely allegorical.
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, once said we should aspire to a night of faith, through a night of infinite degradation. Well I feel as though I've degraded myself nightly since the accident, but have yet to find any faith in the starry void of space which appears when the Sun goes down. I've blamed everyone for what happened - the school, the child, the parents, immigrants - but I've never once looked in the mirror and asked myself what I could have done to prevent the tragedy, and more importantly what I could do now to help those affected by his absence. No, I usually go with the cancer child. But how can I have faith in anything which has allowed this to happen? What kind of sordid deity would strip me of all I had, and allow me to wander his grief planet with a heart as heavy as uranium? You see I can rationalise the tsunami, for though a tragedy where would we be without the precious water that killed all those people (I studied the problem of evil in general studies at school,) and even 9/11 because you expect that kind of thing from Muslims, but what has happened to me defies all notions of theological benevolence.
To quote Nietzsche "It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night." I am inclined to agree. For when I sit by Jason, hour after hour, wailing and sobbing, caressing his cheeks and whispering into his ear, I have to ask myself the most troubling question of all. Does this make me gay?

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