Hope springs eternal

In the wake of the recent rapture failure, I’m doing some retro- and introspecting and am feeling very sorry for all those poor folks that fell for this latest non-happening.  You know some people did.  I can imagine some of these people waking up tomorrow and realizing they’re still alive and well on Earth and being deeply, profoundly wounded by that simple miraculous everyday occurrence.

Today has been a depressing sympathetic sort of day for me, thinking about these lost, rapture-hungry souls.  I remember too well all those many times I woke up to see the world exactly as I left it and felt those loathsome waves of miserable hopeless doubt flooding over me, all merciless and seemingly endless.  It was a horrible, desolate feeling.

I had a really hard time in my childhood coping with inevitability.  I won’t say I’m over it – far from it, clearly, as my other posts sometimes attest.  But I’m over seeking out salves to combat it. 

I don’t know why in my darkest hour I turned to vampires.  It didn’t make sense and it didn’t have to, and all I can say is life transpired to put them there at my worst possible existential moment.  I turned to Anne Rice’s vampires in the hope that I could construct some plausible reality in which they really, truly existed and one day I, too, could attain what they had. 

I haven’t ever felt a yearning like I did for that unreality.  It was a potent all-consuming force, it was this constant aching pressure in my chest and I couldn’t let it go.  I needed it to be real.  It was this ridiculous paradox – I built vampirism up in my mind as simultaneously impossible and pivotal.  Vampires unwisely became my sole hope for escape.  

I sat in my bed every night praying that somehow some improbable telepathic something would hear my distress call and save me from myself and my inescapable fate.  Every single night I stared up at my ceiling, mind tumbling in frantic circles trying to convince myself it could be real, I could have it, I could choose not to die if I wanted to.  Night after night I drifted off to fitful sleep hoping against hope that my miracle would come and I wouldn’t have to wake to see another dawn.

The desert was the cruelest possible place for me to go through this.  Three hundred and sixty days a year I woke up to bright, beaming sunshine streaming through the blinds on my window.  Three hundred and sixty agonizing morning revelations a year, and another five which weren’t very much more comforting.  It was like God was laughing at me.  Some days I cried.  It was torture.  Come to think of it, I don’t know that I made it a full year doing this.  It wore me down really, really fast – that overwhelming palpable need that never, ever got fulfilled.  Not once was I rewarded with even the slightest glimmer of hope.  Obviously. 

So when I think of the rapture today and how it didn’t happen, I remember my own hopeless battle against the status quo and I feel a twinge of empathy for everyone who wanted so badly to believe in it.  I’ve been there.  And it sucks.  But, thankfully, life goes on.