The Lost One

I gave up a room in a beautiful mansion for a solitary existence in a pit.

I’ts called free will I’m told.

It’s all the rage.

Do what you want!

Be who you are!

Don’t let yourself be chained down by the tenants of some outdated superstition.

In the pit free will doesn‘t seem so free anymore.

I tell myself I’m not going to drink.

I do it anyway.

I tell myself that I won’t bend when the soothing tentacles of lust wrap around me and squeeze.

Then I find myself breathless and broken, a prisoner of my own carnal desire.

There are other things than the needle, better things, more gratifying things.

But in the end the needle always wins out.

There is no love here.

Only self loathing.

There is no freedom.

Only the illusion of choice, which in the end is little more than self inflicted subjugation.

As Paul said “What I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate I do.”

I wouldn’t give a bag of vomit for the world that my hands have built of their own free will.

In the moments between the torment I find myself looking up into the darkness hoping and praying for release from the hell of my own making.

There are stories down here of a man who gave up possession of his own free will so that I need not be slave to mine.

Last night he came to me and reached out his hand and said “take hold and come out of the pit.”

I turned away, not of my own free will, but by the unrelenting force of my shame.

He called out again and asked for me to take his hand.

I asked him why? Why would he want to help me? A man so riddled with self doubt and ruled by compulsion that even his own shadow mocks his steps.

He said that he knows my self doubt, rage and loathing because he laid it upon himself. He did not come to save those who don‘t need saving but those who do. He left his entire flock for a single, solitary, angst ridden soul because he loves me.

Of my own free will I reach out and take his hand.