In my mirror God said: Nobody gives a fuck about you.

Imagine saying that to your son!

Jeanne Moreau whispers to me from beyond the grave that there will never come a time when we know for sure if any of us have done well. Our lives and deaths are just accidents, after all.

How brutal is an accident. I’ve been listening to her song on repeat for three hours now and been grinding my teeth all along because I can’t remember a single phenomenon that doesn’t boil down to a cosmic accident. In other words yes I am nothing and I know it, Lord, so can you please stop reminding me?

In the age of antiquity there were angels who announced themselves with content warnings about the breadth of their power, and those with a connection to the divine were hailed as wise men, or madmen, both of whom enjoyed their healthy dose of community support and awed admiration. Meanwhile under the thumb of the Machinegod Modernity I’m expected to work and keep working and look good doing it, paying more in rent and making less in income with every successive year, without much to show for it because no one is sainted much these days either, despite being martyred for all the myriad mistakes an empire makes. Extraction, exploitation, alienation, immolation, the like. I swear I’m trying to resist as best I can. I’m learning from the Sufis mystics who likened a close connection with the divine to being intoxicated. Like my own eucharist rite I’m doing my due diligence, tranquilizing myself often, descending into the depths of divinity, doing my best to keep my other eye open. All the while God is every enormous burning sun and tiny little desk lamp and the single floating eye in the mirror behind me, watching it all go down, whispering revelations on the wind to us.

“No one will love you as much as I do,” God keeps showing, with the biggest smile on what can’t even really be called a face. I know I’m supposed to be encouraged but clearly no one ever figured out how to teach tact to a superhuman cosmic concept. I am still conceptualizing that I am the Eye. It’s easy to forget. But the reminders keep coming whether you listen or not. “You and your pain will be forgotten,” I hear back after I bump my head in the dark and cry out, Why?! Blood runs into my eyes, there aren’t any bandaids, there aren’t any exiles or addictions I might suffer that no one can relate to. I get it. I’m no one’s favorite. Everything I’ve ever wanted will kill me. This need to be seen, to be known; is it not the crying out of a child that feels neglected? And is this not where the favor of the universe is most likely to be seen? Amongst the weak, amongst those whose stories go unheard… But who am I without my compensations? Like a child I asked for a sign or some direction on where to go next and got back: “Nobody gives a fuck about you.” Imagine saying that to your son! God’s grinning, and I’m annoyed also because I can’t help but chuckle too. It’s a stupid pun; God doesn’t have a body; and so I’m never not loved. Deities do dad jokes! And like a father they disappear, you don’t understand their crypticism until years later, and you’ll never shake the coin-flip ambivalence of gratitude/grudge for knowing you simply wouldn’t exist without them. As miserable as your being may be. Before I left Chicago I forced M. to watch miserable movie La Notte with me, Miss Moreau’s best, and I couldn’t keep from crying as God watched it beside us, reminding me as J.M.’s character failed to connect with her whore of a husband: “You’re going to fail too. And just like her one day you will die.” And that’s supposed to be reassuring? There’s a comfort I want to resist in acknowledging that I’m as ephemeral as my favorite old movies, made before my mother and father were born, and one day I’ll be a memory too. Fucking Hell, I tried to hide it but M. heard my sniff, so I had to say this ending always gets to me, how the best and the worst of us cling to each other knowing we aren’t really going anywhere, not together nor separate, and that no one is going to save us. At best they will only watch. Our sins are nothing special, sure, stylish, and insufficient to make the suffering memorable. But no one remembers anyway.

In the early morning God doesn’t have to remind me to smile. I see it for myself on their face, and I see too that it couldn’t have been an accident that this, the smile of the saved, is the easiest way to use all the muscles in the face; in other words every accident was also on purpose. And go on, squint while you’re at it, you might find as I do that the face of your God resembles your own, with a blessèd, Byzantine kind of beauty.