All in my Mind

XVII.

Do you remember before when I told you Alexander was newly an atheist? That wasn't a random occurance obviously. Religions kind of a big deal. He had to choose that.

Currently I'm letting Lily draw on my cast. I don't really want to elaborate. Its honestly embarrassing that we've gotten to this point. We're also outside. The entire thing is ridiculous. She's drawing a patch of flowers, and she's smiling, and I'm literally going to go into spontaneous cardiac arrest if I focus too much on that, so I'm not focusing on that. I'm scowling at the grass and thinking about atheism.

For the record though, I still don't like her.

Alexander's parents were Christians. Not the Bible thumping cult type of Christian, but still Christian. It was apparent to him from early on that this religious thing wasn't that serious. It was just something his parents did because that's what their parents did. He wasn't even sure there was a Bible in the house.

It got slightly more serious when his sister got sick. He understood why that happened too. Parents of sick children needed someone to beg when the doctors said bad things. They couldn't demand miracles out of physicians, but God would do as a close substitute. God could do things physicians couldn't. It was comforting to ask things of God. Having a higher power when shit went wrong was an act of self preservation for them too. Someone to blame and someone to beg wrapped into one. He thought maybe they just wanted to believe there was a plan to everything too.

They didn't even have to go to church that often. Having a dying kid meant that nobody was required to actually attend. It was the best excuse in the world actually. They were busy on sundays with aggressive chemo and radiation and surgeries.

Alexander himself hadn't actually formed much of an opinion on the god thing though. He was big on science and logic and evolution and all the contradictory things, so maybe he was always an atheist on the inside. Outwardly though, Alexander read the Bible cover to cover when he was 12. He was a researcher by nature, obviously. His dad had just told him the devil was present and he'd gone straight to the text to investigate what details he might find about those claims.

Fun fact: it's incredibly common for schizophrenics to fixate on religious imagery. It's literally one of the early warning signs of the diagnosis. We're all guilty of it. Even me. Especially me. I had already renounced the religion thing and it still took some serious interventions to convince me that the boy and the girl weren't secretly demonic beings. That was just a few months ago. It's embarrassing really. I'm a stereotype.

Anyways, Alexander didn't decide to join the No-Jesus Train until he was 15. At that point, his dad had been gone for a little while. Emily had recently gone into remission. For the first time in a very long time, things felt calm and normal. It was unfamiliar for things to be quiet like that. Alexander didn't even have to be alone at night anymore because his sister and his mom were finally home from the hospital on a more permanent basis.

Emily slept in his room for the first bit more often than either of them wanted to admit. For her he assumed it was because she'd rarely had to be alone before. She was only 7, so he didn't blame her for being timid in this new unfamiliar part. On Alexander's side of things, he couldn't deny that he wanted her there too. He'd at least gotten used to being alone, but Emily's fragility scared him. He liked having her where he could see her.

On the night he gave up on the religion thing, he found himself lying awake staring at her. She was curled up in his bed snoring slightly in the way sick kids always seemed to do. Most of her was under the covers, but she had one bony hand attached to a narrow wrist exposed. Her hair was only about an inch long; so short that her little curls couldn't even show yet. Her closed eyes were sitting in the center of semi sunken pits as if to provide a constant reminder that she was only newly healthy. The last several years had been real. This frail little child infront of him was a product of something horrible.