I am not me.
My body is not right.
My brain knows this.
I know this
and I look down and --
WRONG
WRONG
WRONG.

A freak of nature,
he said.
A science project gone wrong,
he said.

I am Frankenstein’s monster,
I think.
Brains organs mind heart limbs
mixed and mismatched.
Odds and ends gathered from street corners and trash cans,
bits and pieces inherited from the dead.
I am not my own.
I am made of
a hundred different people.
Who does that make me?

My makers have abandoned me.

In a scientific sense
my inventors
my parents, who envisioned a child who was not me,
stitched me together part by part,
haphazardly,
then they --
upon seeing their handiwork --
rejected me for who I am.
They burnt their labs and cast me out --
left me to fall apart at the seams, rip myself to shreds --
even though
I only am what they made me.

Nature? Nurture? Either way, it’s
their
fault.

In a religious sense
another kind of creator,
the first creator,
the first mover,
must be
dead or false or cruel
to allow a creature so
ugly and wretched and monstrous
then to
damn me to hell for it.

I never asked for this.

I have met my makers.
I have suffered, died, and been buried.
I have been resurrected and I have risen.
I am more God than my creators,
and
my creators are monsters more than me.

I may look a monster but
I learned,
or should have learned,
how to be a human from them --
how do you learn
kindness
when you haven’t been treated with it?
How do you learn
love
when you haven’t received it?

And yet,
I learn mercy.
I learn forgiveness for their sins,
but three more times
three hundred more times
three thousand more times
they have betrayed me.

They call me Lilith
(Abigail).
They banish me from the Garden of Eden
(home).

He called me an insult to God,
sick,
the work of the devil.

Am I a demon because I would not
go like a lamb to the slaughter,
obey my them in gratitude for my own existence?
Life is a gift I never wanted. I willingly descend into Hell.

“You owe them grandchildren,”
he said,
and this time I laughed.
I refuse to people the earth.
I refuse to
throw my genes into a genetic lottery I have already lost.
I refuse to become a creator,
to condemn my own flesh and blood by bringing them, unbidden, into this world as --
as what?
Demons, tainted by original sin?
I refuse to risk this,
however much I love my Samael.