I do not know what Fragility is

My anger does not serve me, but I serve me

I do not know what fragility is. Unless fragility is the fear of death, the fear of vitality draining from my body and joy mouldering from a world that at least had some of it and now has none. But I do not think that is what you mean when you call me fragile. So if not that, then I do not know what it is.

Is it yet another human condition, real and relatable, that you have cleaved from the heart and made into a crime? Should I now be bashful of the fear that sits with knees huddled to its chest in the corner of my soul, the tender thing that we all have to learn to love rather than chastise and neglect? Was that part wrong - should we send this fragile child back into the corner where it belongs? Is this scared child the “fragility” that makes me now a villain? Or are only some of us now supposed to learn to love ourselves, while the rest of us should languish in a state of shameful self-reproach until the hour of expiration ferries our wrongness from this world?

To me this makes no sense. Not because I am ignorant, but because I have been paying attention. Was it not you who sat me down cross-legged on school gymnasium floors, to listen while you used your words to purge the filth of self-hatred from my veins? I listened when you told me that I was to love myself. I listened when you told me not to let someone call me names. I listened when you told me I was worth 100 sparrows. What now has changed, that I should no longer love myself? What now has changed, that my innocence is turned to fragility? I do not know what that word means.

This now you call ignorance. But my ignorance is not a weapon of war, as you so often call it. My confusion at your mandates and resistance to your insults is not borne from provocation. It comes instead from wisdom spoken from the mouths of people just like you. Once you told me I was special, but now you tell me I am not. Once you told me I was good, but now you tell me I am not. It is as if I have been filled with some otherworldly foulness, a possession of my soul so deep that I can no longer even see through my own eyes the many ways that I am wicked.

Perhaps that is it - do you think fragility is a demon? They say that demons will do anything to hide their true name, for if one were to speak it, they would gain power over them entirely. You speak of my heart and name the things inside of it as if naming what I feel means you have found me out. But what have you done to earn access to the things inside my heart? To let someone inside of you means that you have given them permission; a permission never granted when the ask is filled with fury. You say you know what is inside of me; that you see filth and hatred and - yes, of course - fragility. But I would never trust someone such as you to peer inside the heart I love so dearly.

Perhaps the guarding of my heart is evidence enough to prove me guilty. I did not know I was on trial, but if I am then I should at least be allowed to take the stand? Of course not, trials are only for those who may still yet prove innocent, and through my hiding my intentions I have already spoiled that. So if I am not on trial, I must already be strapped into the chair. Such is life on this planet, I suppose; one person’s death is a tragedy while another is entertainment. But even so, if I am about to be subject to the “judgment of the masses,” to be killed by that which is neither cruel nor unusual, then at least allow me my last words.

They are this:

“I have always been fragile, since the very start. I have always been fragile because I have always been afraid. Not of myself, but of people like you, who plunge their hands into human hearts and rip them out still beating, just to hold them up on high, so crowds can see it rot and die. You say that you must do it because I would not show it off when asked. You say you must do this to prove my heart was foul and sickly unto death. That the poison inside of that heart would have seeped through the water and into the veins of others, if it were not for your kindly intervention.

But of course the hearts of men are shriveled and pathetic when separated from their body. Of course a heart will rot and die when out of communion with my soul. You have proven nothing, and everyone who sees this execution will know that you have proven nothing as well. And you will know this too. You will know this because you, like all of the cruel and unmerciful of history, know that none of this is happening as an act of justice served. Just like Montezuma atop Templo Mayor, you do not actually perform this sacrifice as an act to please the gods. You do not snatch the life out of my body to protect the huddled masses. You do it for one reason and one reason alone:

Because you are fragile. So fragile that you would sooner execute an innocent man than face the fact that you, too, will one day die.”

To God I say this morning: it is only you who deserves my heart. You can take it when you want. Amen.

“Saturn Devouring One of His Sons,” Francisco Goya (c. 1819 - 1823)