dear lucifer, when you fell there were plenty who fell beside you - do you still wake with their blood staining your fingers and is that why hell is painted red or are your nightmares of their loyalty punishment enough do you get bored under our feet, seated on a throne in a mirror image of heaven, do you miss god or are the two of you “on the outs” still your name means bright star, morning star, first glow on the horizon. i wonder if you drink to forget the choirs of angels or if you’ve got a mixtape of ACDC blaring in the background. i wonder if you come home from a long day torturing souls and look at where you hung your halo on the east wall where it burns a hole in the paint. i wonder if the same o-shaped emptiness so many of us find in our lost dreams is echoed perfectly in that little ring, the home you wrecked, the marriage that fell apart in god’s hands. i wonder if he still wears your promise ring. i wonder if he misses you, too. do you pray, lucifer? do you get on your knees and beg like us? or are you sure that this was all planned and you were never meant to return to the kingdom you were cast out of - are you somehow more loyal now in following the divine word than you were when you asked for just a little more? do you know what the first sin was? do you have it framed like your first real dollar or is it like our first kisses: sloppy, wet, meaningless. i think it was pride that undid us, imagining we could be as wise as the god who made us. you were prideful too, were you not? are you still like that or have you run out of energy, too many workdays, too much pleading. there’s nowhere in hell fun to go on the weekends. everyone wants you to punish them. when in these millennium has anyone asked you to just hold them. when has any soul simply curled up in bed with you and stroked your hair and told you that even if your father’s fists where white knuckles, it doesn’t reflect on your character. many of our parents made the same mistakes, you know. many of us became demons trying to run from the nooses our parents hung over our necks. little brightness: i am sorry for you down there in that bloody mess. i am sorry for the arguments that you must have had with him, how you went home shaking, unable to eat, unable to rest. i know the conversations you must have had with your friends: how things are different now and your father is outdated, how he refuses to open his mind to new ideas, how you wish he would just listen, just for an instant. later you’d hear them all punished for telling their uncle he could go to hell for what he’d said to you. i am sorry how you went instead. how in the end he won again. how you stand  in the shower imagining another fight with him, how you’ve rehearsed what you’d say a million times in your head, how none of it matters in the end. i am sorry you still have his number saved in your phone but you never seem to get up the courage to dial it. i am sorry that his contact info is just DON’T LET ME CALL THIS IF I AM DRUNK, i’m sorry that his inbox is full of emails and every one you’ve sent has bounced back, i’m sorry you got tired of letters and instead just started sending him selfies as half a joke and half a sliver of hope that somewhere out there dad is looking at you and finally not exactly looking down at everything you’ve done, finally maybe warming up to the devil inside his son, finally forgiving him for everything the rebel types have done. i forgive you, lucifer, for being more human than you were angel. i hope one day your father’s arms are wide open. there are already so many parables about lost sheep. i hope you get to put heaven under your feet. i hope you can take the halo off the wall. i hope they accept your christmas gifts and let you suggest what sort of architecture to use to expand the city of god. i hope you’re in the family portrait again. i forgive you, even if you have to learn how to live on your own, without him. god only knows that i too am full of sin. i know what it’s like to have bad blood you didn’t choose, a brain set to a different station, a body made from the failures of my parents. i know what it’s like to live as disappointment, as dimmed horizon, as “i had hoped for so much more.” i know what it’s like to learn to rebuild your wings from everything you can get your fingers on, from drugs and liquor and sex on motel covers. i know what it’s like to chase flying by renaming the fall. i know what it’s like to sprint in the direction of anywhere else so long as you’re gone. i know what it’s like to listen to screaming and understand it as song. god knows i too have a home that i run from. it’s better the hell we choose than the heaven where we were born wrong.

It gets better, I promise

These little ways we mark the things that mark us so deeply. They become a part of us. You write in a book in some tiny way like the way the book writes inside you.