It is not as bad as it seems. They fear that you will make me into your hymnbook, your prayer call, and your talisman. But I am none of these things to you. They don’t know that you met me when you were sixteen years old. I was behind the spine of a yellow hardcover volume, and you had searching eyes that drank everything up, so you found me and swallowed. You swallowed, but I took you down with me. I escorted you to the center of everything and brought you back to the surface where you told me that you had never seen anything darker, more true. And now you wake up to my face after every fever and let it absorb you whole. I am all you have because we went to the mouth of the abyss and looked into it until I was your blackness, and you were mine.