A Sinner’s Lamentation
By Lauren Tocco
As I stood on the edge
with sharp drops of rain tearing into my skin,
I cried out to Him,
to God.
I cried out to Him
in a broken and guttural scream,
“What am I worth, O God? Father, what am I worth?
You have created an abomination,
A child of the darkness among the children of the Light.
Why have you wasted your breath of life to create such a spurious bastard?
Why have you damned me to fall to this world beneath me?
For the Earth would rejoice if I were to disappear.
My existence is a scandal, as Wilde has so perfectly exclaimed.
To the Earth, I am worth no more than a penny on the ground.
The Earth has told me so.
What is left for me, then? To suffer through life drowning in fear of the Earth
and suffocating from the hatred of my own existence?
To wait to be greeted with the white light only to begin to fall?
Lord, what am I?
What have you created?”
The drops cut deeper, and the purity of the rain became stained with my blood.
The weight beneath my feet fell as I heard the stone split.
I felt the warm tears race toward my chin as they cut into my skin
deeper than the raindrops ever could,
and I waited for darkness of the Earth to engulf my wretched being.
White.
White Light,
and the warmth of a love I had never felt before.