Momentary Sacrifice

 

For several days now I had been conducting a quiet, obscure war. A small war, private, untelevised… not unlike the wars of the mendicants or flagellants; those hungry saints who beat themselves with cords to feel closer to the unnameable.

My battlefield was a chamber of weeds, a sanctuary grown wild with disuse and perhaps mercy. It may once have been a storage shed or the bones of a forgotten greenhouse. But I had made it sacred by the act of tearing.

Each morning: one bill. Always a ten. Jackson's face torn in quadrants, one piece dropped east, one west, one to the wind, one underfoot. The rite was methodical. The sacrilege was exact.

I did it to destroy the root, to disrupt the wormhole in my chest that had twined itself around the desire for accumulation. A fetish, not of worship but of yearning, of obsession, of the silent panic that can wakes me in the night, panting for what I do not yet have.

On the second day, as I stood on the weeds, I looked down at the scrap in my hand, this worn, fibrous rectangle of power, and saw it finally as it was: a piece of paper. An object without essence. A body whose soul I had invented.

I saw then how much of my life I had given to these revenants of value. How many hours I'd sold to preserve the illusion of worth.

And then… everything became transparent: the bill, the chamber, my intentions, my body, even the leaf that fluttered past my shoulder as I stooped to place the second quadrant into the soil.

I began to cry, but not for the money. Not for myself either. It was the kind of weeping that comes when a person understands, for one suspended moment, that everything around them is dying, and they too are dying, and there is no villain in it, only motion.

I thought of the people I loved. How little I had said. How foolishly I had traded time for control and business, affections for assurances, letters for ledgers.

At the third mark, I halted. I made a circle with my finger in the dust. A magic circle but not for summoning. Rather for banishing. To tell the spirit of money, or the echo of my longing for it: Go.

There were no candles, no altar, no knife. Only the final shard of the ten-dollar bill, held like a relic between two trembling fingers, and my voice, raw, trembling, untheatrical:
“I release you.
You are nothing.
You are what I made you
because I forgot the deeper thing.”

And in that moment, not redemption, not transformation, but clarity.
Clarity in the form of weeds.
Clarity in rusted nails.
Clarity in wind and tears and paper,
scattered like autumn prayers across a forgotten chamber where I, a fool of the world, had come to offer what I no longer needed.