Define salvation. The mind immediately grasps for explanations of the metaphysical, recollections of the mystical, wisps of stardust and Divine refuse, ethereal trails of holy time, thoughts, visions, majestic myths. The Divine. We all have some joker in the sky to blame for our joys and our woes, existence of flesh, the theoretical residence of ghostly apparitions of self, the infamous soul. We exist to toil and amuse, and if the holy men are right, the allotted ratios are something we all have to decide in life.

Salvation implies distress, strained existence, discomfort and insistence to persist without so much as an explanation as to what we need to accomplish in our mortal state. The coil, they call it. Coil and recoil, life and death, it’s all the same meager sentiment, this jumbled mess. The debts we retain in life extend further than a grave or the confines of generations or decades, the waves of fate ever failing to respond to our devastation, our indignant rage, the demands and indictments in favor of explanation, justification for indiscriminate destruction, incessant hate. Humanity has been set ablaze, and who in God’s name are we expecting to tend to the flames?

Salvation is change, a means of relief from intolerable heat, and moaning, indefinite need, greed for desire’s sake, the sake of revisions to escape the weight of lamentable lost purity. Salvation is the culmination of dreams, the subconscious growing with ever more contempt, yet each day we rely on those depths to keep us afloat, to live in the exclusion of savagery. Many fail. Yet those dreams drive us forward, mere vessels of tendons, bones, water, delicate flesh, and self-transcending selves in need of a destination worth attaining, a justification for this retched state in which we toil and grieve and exist on the insistence of fear. Such is life, and such is us. Salvation can’t seem to come soon enough.