Today I went to a faith healer

Last night, Tim suggests to me, I go to a faith healer. Implicit in this, maybe I'm broken, I don't know. I don't feel right, but I'm not sick and I'm quite sane (which at times I'm afraid is precisely the problem).

After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.

I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'

Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.

Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.

I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.

On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.

The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.