I’m aiming to make this nook of the internet a place that you can come and get an accurate definition of who I am. A place that I can talk about what goes on in my head, and maybe you can find some interest in my humanity.

I have been thinking back to my youth lately. It’s scary how vividly you can remember the smells and the feelings, and the bitter knowledge of the brevity of your situation. The clumsiness of your first kiss and the relief of her being okay with it. Pride and embarrassment and feeling like you’re not alone for the first time, all wrapped up into one. Years later you remember the girls who you had, or didn’t have, or could have had. You remember the youth and the startling beauty in their face and it haunts your dreams. The sweetest reminder that you were once so wide eyed.

It’s a gift, and it’s so fleeting and beautiful, and then it’s gone. You’re left for a lifetime with the impression it left on you. You realize that when you are old and the beauty of youth has long left you, that these memories will burn in your imagination as vividly as yesterday. You have children of your own and it strikes you that they will have these experiences, in their own way. You are at once happy knowing that they will know the beauty of it, and sad that they will also find the shortness of it.

I think back to those years and realize how quickly the time since has left me. It’s jarring to see how fast life moves and is gone. It’s not a heartbeat in the pulse of eternity. Not an entire exhale. It’s so short and everything I do seems in vein in the face of it. I become instantly aware that I am scared of dying.

I hate the idea of simply not being. I find the idea of hell and eternal torture to be a kinder fate than to simply cease to exist. Certainly if one could retain themselves in the face of eternal torture, they’d still have their memory. I am haunted by wondering what will happen in the future after I die, and wondering what the faces of the beautiful girls in my memory are like now. I wonder if they would look on me differently after seeing what time has done to me. I think, sometimes, that life is a cruel joke and memory is the punchline. Remembering the smell of her and the taste, remembering her touch and every intimate detail. Knowing it’s gone forever. Knowing I will one day no longer be aware that it ever happened, or of anything.

I can understand why someone would give themselves to a religion, to the promise of eternity. I wish with all of myself that I could know the comfort of feeling like there was something after I die. I wish that the pain of knowing I am finite would be gone. I feel like I have a soul and I have a morality, and I feel like it is the result of my being a part of something larger than the confines of a lifespan. I want nothing more than to know that it’s the truth and that everything will be okay. I really do.

I can’t believe in the religions I have been presented with. I refuse to find console in the bosom of gods I find tyrannous and morally lacking. Gods that were okay with war and slavery and hating a man for his beliefs. Gods that say “do as I say, not as I do” and gods that promise vengeance upon a person who cannot believe what they have not shown themselves to be.

I am bitter in the face of the choices I have been given. I am bitter in the face of my own mortality. I feel small and weak and fleeting. I feel human in spite of my soul.