I just got off the phone with my aunt.
An aunt I dearly love and care for profoundly.
An aunt that is a deeply wounded person that has sought refuge in religion. Right wing, funamentalist, extremist religion.
The religion of fear and separation and desperation and threats and condemnation.
I am close with her, so when things get hard she calls.
She she believes is dying today.
She is worried about my eternal salvation.
She is not concerned with herself, only with my place in heaven.
She tells me this in a hysterical tone, speech slurred by all the over medicating she does.
These conversations leave me gutted and exhausted.
I spent the last six months of my paternal grandmother's life, having the same drugged out, hysterical, confused conversations.
I don't need this in my life. I do not deserve to have people I love turn into babbling psychic vampires, with scary voices that make me feel like they have been possessed by the very demons they fear.
Ironically,. I am the target of this lunacy because I have had loving relationships with these people, because I will listen, I will care, I will be effected.
I am not able to tell them what they want to hear, but I can be polite, concerned.
There is no relationship in these conversations.
The religiousness robs them of intimacy, or authenticity.
There is only the desperation of what I hope is the regret that there was not more love, more contact, more pleasant times. I don't know. That is what I hope I put up with this shit for. I hope this insanity translates into love.
"Why do you let these things bother you so much?"
My mother asks.
"Hang up"
She suggests.
and that is why they call me, and not her.
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