Part I. God, I am speaking to you from a place that looks suspiciously like heaven if heaven were designed by someone who misunderstood restraint. The clouds here wear silk. The angels smoke memory like opium. And I I kneel in the middle of it all, a man stitched together from contradictions and longing. I have sinned, or so they tell me. Not with violence, not with greed, but with the soft catastrophe of loving men the way poets love their own ruin. I prayed, once, with the desperation of a chandelier begging not to fall. I asked you to unmake me, to sand down the edges of my desire until I became smooth, acceptable, holy in the way pamphlets define holiness. But every morning I woke up still myself a man whose heart beats in the direction of other men, a compass that refuses to point north. I tried to change. God, I tried with the theatrics of a saint auditioning for martyrdom. I hurt people along the way women who mistook my gentleness for promise, men who mistook my fear for rejection, myself most of all. I bruised my own soul with the elegance of a velvet whip, punishing myself for a crime I never committed.