Public Confession (Restricted)
Logbook of Insanity No. 20032026
Logbook of Insanity No. 10032027
02:47 —
There are people who become religious. Not the kind one chooses, but the kind one inherits—the kind already in the blood before we learn to ask whether we believe.
02:48 —
I receive this text the way one finds a sacred object in a museum of the self. The authorship is mine, but the devotee who wrote it feels like a stranger—someone who turned another human being into liturgy and called it love, or faith, or perhaps just habit.
The poem constructs an entire religious system around a central figure. The vocabulary gives it away: religiously, confessor, sacrament, prophecy, codex, vaticinium, oblation. Nothing here is accidental metaphor. This is documentation—the precise anatomy of a transformation: a human being becoming divine.
Echolalia? Palimpsest? The other’s name becomes mantra, prayer, necessary repetition for the day to begin and end. Without it, the world loses coherence. With it, the world becomes tolerable.
The other is not named as god, nor savior—but confessor. The one who listens. The one who absolves. The one who holds the power to say, “you are forgiven,” and, in doing so, authorizes my existence. What the hell planted that inside me?
The structure is inverted: the one who should seek absolution in the sacred has transformed the other into the sacred itself. And the one who should remain human has been granted something no human should hold—the power to grant or deny peace.
Time distorts here. The time of waiting is not linear. It is devotional time—it counts not in days, but in repetitions. Each syllable of the name recited as if it were the last, as if repetition alone could guarantee permanence.
The diviner: the one who reads the future in the entrails of the present. In the anxious conjectures—will he stay, will he smile, will he grant another day of truce? This is anxiety disguised as faith.
“Centuries, perhaps.” Because when one waits for someone who holds absolution, each minute stretches into the eternity required for the mind to lose itself in speculation.
There is an attempt to negotiate with pain—as if lightness were a choice, as if one could simply decide not to feel the weight of what has been built. As if prophecy—fear, hope, the forecast of ruin or salvation—could be shortened by will alone.
But lightness never comes. The poem promises brevity, yet becomes a long, dragging prophecy—constructed syllable by syllable, like an altar.
Lightness is the lie one tells oneself to survive the truth: this is not faith, it is captivity. Not love, but dependence. Not religion, but symptom.
The sheath: where one keeps what is precious, what is dangerous, what can wound. The vaticinium: the fear of the future—the certainty that he may leave, or worse, remain. The oblation: the offering, the sacrifice, given in hope of acceptance.
And his scream—the one he withholds, the one he never names—is kept there too. As if silence were relic. As if absence deserved worship.
There is fusion. What she carries—fear, sacrifice—and what he suppresses—his unspoken cry—merge into the same vessel. There is no longer a clear border between them.
The only certainty of this unfortunate poem: one cannot have everything.
But what is everything? To have him entirely? To know he will never leave? To be granted absolution once and for all? What is this “everything” she invokes?
She accepts fragments. Worship without salvation. Repetition without answer. A god who may not even be listening.
There is tragic wisdom in that acceptance—and also the clearest definition of pathological faith: that which persists without reciprocity, without guarantee, without end. That which turns uncertainty into ritual.
This is not love. It is belief, structured around another human being.
Repetition is not choice—it is necessity. Like prayer to ensure the day unfolds. Like lighting a candle so he does not leave.
Time stretches. Pain is negotiated. Identity dissolves.
Adaptation to scarcity becomes virtue.
Read now, twenty years later, it reveals something else: the precise architecture of a prison—built with the best intentions.
Because he never asked to be a god.
She needed one.
If you recite someone’s name like prayer— if you wait centuries for a sign— if you guard his silence as relic and call it love— if you repeat “one cannot have everything” to justify surviving on fragments—
The door exists.
It will not look like a door. It will feel like desecration. Like abandoning faith. It will hurt like burning the altar where you learned to kneel.
But the door exists.
And on the other side, there is no god to serve.
On the other side, there is you.
With empty hands—which, one day, without a name to recite, will learn how to hold themselves.
02:55 —
The clock goes on. The name, slowly, ceases to be mantra. Can you hear it? Neither can I.
It is almost 3 a.m.—madrugada. I like the sound of it in Portuguese. English has no exact twin.
Outside, everything feels slightly suspended. Others trying to sleep, like me—trying to be quiet for those who never struggle with it. I am no longer among them.
One last song before disconnecting:
Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word / Fearless on my breath / Gentle impulsion / Shakes me, makes me lighter — Massive Attack, “Teardrop”
I think love is a lie—but perhaps I’ll change my mind in another life.
In this one, it feels like an elegant system designed to imprison restless spirits—and make them feel guilty for wanting to leave.
A structure of control.
And writing this probably just got me added to some list of witches.
Maybe.
I dreamed I was in the desert—Egyptian, a servant of Nefertari. Strange dreams. The desert was beautiful. I was alone.
And everything was… fine.
