Dohas

People used to be terrified of photographs. There’s an age old belief that a single snapshot could steal a piece of your soul, your very being. Even if I choose to believe this old folktale, I don’t understand why their first instinct was fear. The everyday impulse of man is to strive for immortality, usually god given. Why would you not want a piece of yourself to live forever, preserved in paint, paper, or ink? Gods get statues and stained glass; why not us?

Let my body rest in the woods, but not my spirit. The slow, dusty, mixed up air of my soul will live in backrooms and apartments, on city streets and sewer grates. But my corpse deserves rest, deserves to live with its own kind in moss and discarded bone. Let me be eaten slowly by the world, until it's ready to spit out something new. Let me remember the soil in between my skin and tissue. Let me meet death like the flower petals on my eyelids.

We were made in his image, they say, but the angels certainly weren’t. You can see the similarities in their irises, in the slope of their many heads. Some human, some animal, some eldritch. They are more parts than persons, a fractured mirror of the world below. No wonder looking too close will make even the faithful blind.

If you came to me, forked tongue and legs not yet stolen, I don’t know what I would’ve said. I used to think it would be easy to avoid you, to cast off your false promises. But I was always a slave to my impulses, too curious for my own damn good. It is said that God cast them out because he was afraid knowledge made them his equals.