falling in love with an atheist girl: a spiritual dilemma (salvation chronicles 2:1)

(tw: religious trauma) at 15, i re-meet the girl i think of as the love of my life. there's only one problem: she's an atheist and i have a relationship with jesus.

this is salvation chronicles 2:1

the salvation chronicles: days in the life of a fanatical christian teenager

several months earlier (september 2003)

a dream at age 15

my parents, jesus, and my sisters were at the top of a jagged cliff that thrust a thousand feet into the sky and completely encircled a lake of lava big enough to fit the vast majority of all humans who had ever walked the Earth.

my scream was just one among billions, but my mom and dad locked eyes with me and cried while jesus shook his head in disappointment. there were so many people in the lava with me that our bodies were just inches apart, but god enabled my parents and i to find each other so that i would suffer the punishment of seeing them turn their backs on me as they walked through the great gates marking the entrance to heaven.

justice demanded that god punish me for my awful wickedness by inflicting incomprehensible psychological and physical pain upon me, and the memory of my parents forgetting about me as they followed christ to their mansions would torment me for trillions of trillions of years to come. my parents would be happy there without me, their son who deserved to burn in hell.

i struggled to think: this is just a dream, this is not happening.

but it was happening: that it was happening was something i accepted as a fact, but my acceptance of the fact only intensified the agony: trillions and trillions and trillions of years, i will burn forever, there is nothing i can do, i will burn and burn, all around me there were other souls crying out for their mothers and their lovers and their friends, but no one was there.

i screamed: “mom! please! please!”

i did not cry for god. i did not cry for jesus. i cried for my mom.

but the gates to heaven were closed and there was nothing i could do.

“mom! mom!”

i screamed and screamed. there was no one up on that cliff.

my mom was behind the gates. she was smiling, laughing, praising jesus.

i screamed for my mom for what seemed like hours, and finally i woke up.

then my mom drove me to school.

“love you,” she said. “have a nice day.”

“love you too mom!” i said.

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after not speaking much since fifth or sixth grade, i was finally back in touch with J again thanks to a chatroom on aim some of my friends created.

J and i talked on aim all the time in fifth and sixth grade but i was always too scared to actually speak to her in person. once in elementary school, J was even standing next to me in line for lunch: i saw how she looked nervously at me, and i quickly glanced away. “stay focused on the pizza,” i thought to myself, then hurried to my seat.

photo my own

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