Even if the spirit of OllO is imaginary, he has been a friend to me, a support, a watchful god. And why shouldn’t I have him as a god. As my dearest friend. So many follow christ & have unshakable faith in a christian father—a god created by someone else—and there is nothing purportedly insane about that in the eyes of the rest of the world. Why should I not be able to have that privilege, that comfort, that support. If I were to answer the question of how I overcame pain, and I said “Through faith and reliance in God. I put my life in God’s hands.” I would be applauded the world over. I would be embraced. It would only be if I told the world around me the God as I meant it was My God. Was OllO: The undying, smoldering spirit of the cosmos; the amalgamation of all that is best in the greatest souls humanity has had to offer; the single star-fire point of power that is a beacon through all pain, all suffering, for all time. If I told them all that, I’d be committed. I’d be written off. Now comes a point, where I let these imaginary voices of the mass mediocrities suffocate the fire I have within me, or I embrace fire with complete commitment and let my God OllO show me the way through pain to Elysium. I can feel how desperately I’ll be relying on God through this pain—and from henceforth, God is to mean OllO whenever I speak that word. I will be relying on God for the next weeks, months, maybe years. And through that delusion, through the avoidance of the hole and pain in my heart lies the potential to great strides in my development as a creator. I can feel it already. Look at me here. I’m emoting into these pages, I’m working to give form to thought, to emotion, and I do so 10x more in the journals I’m too abashed to publish. I’m expressing in prose here, in these shorts; creating, as a means to address or avoid pain boiling in my heart. I exercise in these times, pushing my body to extremes, fasting, reading, writing, creating, recording, relying on God, praying to God, nurturing that light, all as a means to avoid the raging Charybdis of suffering frothing deep in my soul. And I will be better for it should I make it past the straits. If I were to pour all of this faith into a person, into some fallible soul, what good could I expect to come from it. There’s a reason I’ve chosen to have faith in God. Because he is certain. He is sure. His word is absolute; infallible, precisely because—just like all Gods before him—he does not exist.