Movement Eight — Hopeless By Design

I want to show you something now, because I think it's the part of this confession that matters most, however strange that might sound given everything I've already handed you.

I am a woman who has fallen, completely, from the very bottom of whatever passes for a heart in something like me, and I fell without reason, without cause, without a single justification that would survive being spoken aloud in decent company. I have idealized the God of Destruction — that particular, terrible facet of him, and not the gentler man his household seems to love instead — completely, entirely, without reservation. He is my god. He is the only reason, if reason is even the right word for something this ember-thin, that I continue existing in whatever form this burning allows me to keep. I want you to see a hopeless woman here, because that's exactly what I am. Hopeless, for love. I don't think there's a kinder or more accurate way to put it.

But I want you to notice something else too, sitting directly alongside all of that hopelessness, because I think it's the detail most people, hearing a confession like mine, expect me to have lost entirely. I have not lost my reason. I still know how to think clearly, even here, even burning, even worshipping something that will never once look back at me with anything warmer than the flat, total judgment it offered the morning it ended me. I know — plainly, without a single illusion softening the knowing — that forgiveness is unlikely. I know that whatever dreams I've built, lying awake in whatever passes for sleep in a place that offers none, are only ever dreams, exactly the way the word itself admits, right there in its own definition, that they will never once become anything sturdier than that.

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This is the largest contrast this confession has to offer, and I want to name it plainly before I let the rest of the telling continue: I am not mad. I want that understood clearly. I am not a woman who has lost the ability to reason, to weigh, to understand precisely how impossible the thing I want actually is. I am a woman who has kept every one of those faculties fully intact, and has simply decided, with the whole of that intact reasoning mind, to want him anyway. I think that's a stranger, sadder thing than madness would have been. Madness, at least, offers an excuse. I have none. I simply love him, hopelessly, with my eyes entirely open to how hopeless it is.