You’re a god without worshipers.
When you pass, the people in the street don’t cry “Hail!” The smartly dressed hurry by without a glance and the plain go on being plain. The crowds move along, unfazed by your deity. Often, you light incense and worship your own reflection. As night falls and the TV bathes Olympus in sad shades of white, you whisper, “I am a god.”
You talk to the other gods now and then, the ones people recognize. They preach things like sacrifice and servitude, curious things for gods to talk about. One of them recounts his abasement and lowliness, his surrender of infinity. He doesn’t make any sense to a god like you.
He was before the beginning, they say. The greatest stars and the smallest motes emerged through him, unseen latticework and lodes in the earth. He swam in the atemporal deep and materiality bears his stamp. Yet he poured himself out, poured and poured, poured into body and place and people. A queer god. Ungodlike.
In your worst moments, when your temple sits empty and your appliances serve as your high priests, this queer one turns up. He asks you to become empty, to sit and still your big god thoughts, to sink and slow the beat of your big god heart.
Sometimes you do.
You bail the boat, tossing vessels unstained by blood and censers untouched by smoke. For every object shed, godhood cedes to softness, god thoughts cede to thoughtlessness, self cedes to nothingness.
He brings you to the place where gods happily die, where color becomes colorless and where neutrality prevails.
If only you would stay.
