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And yet your hands remain empty. You have nothing but your name and a heart with its perfunctory motions of pumping the blood that keeps you alive. But your skin is thin and your flesh so tender that the knife has already pierced your heart and only when your blood scatters on the ground that you realise nothing truly belongs to you.

What does it mean for something to belong to you? Was it ever truly yours, when it can be taken instantly?

Your heart has died but it is your anguished thirst for sovereignty that drives your hands to clutch at your chest, and to feebly grasp at the dispersed blood and flesh before you. For your greed runs deeper, not in mind but intertwined in your heart itself. Your avarice has coiled itself in the depths of your flesh, where every cell in your body has forsaken its function to satiate your restless hunger.

All that effort, and you remain starved and deprived, for your greed cannot be met. To glut yourself of every craving will only leave you hollow while your appetite grows. The agonising sharpness in your chest, and blood that trickles down your abdomen has you itching for more. But the bitter realisation that you have discarded your soul to feed your cravings is all that is left.

What does it mean for something to belong to you? Was it ever truly yours, when you have rejected it yourself?

I can imagine god sitting in his chair, hovering over the potter’s wheel with a sardonic grin on his lips. His omnipotent hands, capable of creating beautiful mountains and alluring oceans, were used to create my pitiful existence.

He created hands that would seek aberrant desires, eyes that would gaze upon forbidden sights, and a heart so heavy, it may as well fall out of my chest and stop beating. An existence so futile, I truly wondered if I was created out of ridicule or benevolence.

The nature of my being proved negligence during its formation. The faint scratches I was born with, that soon morphed into cracks due to my brittle foundation. How I was frequently pushed aside, as a hollow vase placed on a forgotten shelf by virtue of my ruined temperament.

Indeed, it was a virtue. For who am I, of inferior status, to question why god has designed me this way? It was an immoral transgression, for such a corrupted creature as I to even doubt god’s judgement. Rather, I should be grateful. I should prostrate, with hands clasped together and tears in my eyes, out of sheer gratitude. To be joyful that I was born, even if it was out of contempt.

The expectation that I must plunge into shame and hide the essence of who I am was forced upon me. I was obliged to be contrite for hands stained with blood that I was born with. I was to be ashamed of sins that I did not commit.

But I continued to carry a guilt that was not mine. I feigned humiliation for so long that it became engrained into me. A new crack added to the damaged visage, one that blended in with my previous defects.

Holding this position of submission for so long had my knees aching, and my blood tainting the pure ground that I rested my forehead on. I couldn’t move, nor did I want to. I pathetically clung to the belief that if I displayed my remorse, I would be atoned for my immorality.