Prologue - Dex

Apparently, God is love.

Apparently, His love is boundless.

Call me crazy, but that sounds a lot like the love is love movement to me.

Except it's not.

It turns out, when God's love is filtered through endless rulemakers and gatekeepers and fearmongers, from those who penned the blood-curdling cautionary tales of the Old Testament to every fearful, dogmatic parish priest I've ever met, it emerges beyond recognition.

A love of bounds.

Of conditions.

Of expected conformity.

According to my parents, and to the priests and monks who taught me all through my formative years, God's love is straight and cisgendered and exclusionist. He may love a sinner, but our only chance of salvation, of basking in the unparalleled warmth of His love, is to repent. To promise not to sin.

Which comes to the crux of my problem.

The realest, most visceral, most pressing emotions, desires, I've ever experienced in my thirty years can all be classified as one neat category.

Sins.

So I suppress them. I deny them, even to myself, even knowing as a person of decent intelligence that there cannot truly be anything wicked about them.

And, every day of my existence, I attempt to make peace with knowing that this straight, bounded thing—the thingI've been taught exemplifies love—is as close as I'll come to the true experience of it.

But it's an uneasy peace, because this limited type of love cannot, surely, be the reason we've all been put on this earth.