Six in the Morning

So it’s six in the morning and in four hours I’ll be at church. I don’t even know if I believe in God. In fact, I don’t even know why the hell I’m going in the first place. I lack conviction but I am at the same time so bound by habit that I have to go. I like ritual though. It allows you to loose yourself in repetitive motions and allows your soul to wander. But I undergo rituals every day, so why do I keep waking up when my body is crying to go back to bed when I cannot really give myself a single good reason for doing it? I suppose that I could blame it on my family. The one thing that my godfather, more like my father really ever asked of my family is that they, “keep their faith,” but to me that is ridiculous. How can you ask, or for that matter even expect someone to do you a favor of personal convictions? And even if that person were to agree, could they actually do little more than act the role meaninglessly? And that brings me to the point. My entire life is like when I go to church. No part of me wants to be present wherever I am but I still do it, because the only thing that is really expected of me it to stick around and play my role. But life as ritual is different. Instead of getting lost in it I am consumed by it. The method acting of my existence is so intense that it is becoming increasingly harder to discern where the role that is put on me by family and friends ends and where the real me, and my real wants and motives begins. I am the epitome of a puppet on strings. I dance to the needs of others and never really even know where I am let alone how to take charge of things. I want to run away, I want to tell everyone in my life to fuck off and be alone for the rest of eternity, and I want to be my own for once. For once I do not want the bell to toll for me, I want to wake up and not be greeted with a sea of faces expectantly leering at me, awaiting my service to them to begin. But what the hell, I’m tired, and church is in a few hours.