Hell, Except for One Thing

When someone tells me to go to hell, I tell them I’m on my way.

I mean it. Not as a performance, not as the edgy reply of someone who wants to seem unbothered — as an honest statement of where I think I’m headed, based on a reasonably thorough accounting of the ledger. I’ve written about this before, in different ways, in different pieces: the bad person who does good things without an audience, the one who’s made peace with the verdict, who doesn’t chase redemption because redemption was never the point and the ledger doesn’t come out clean regardless of what comes after. I know what I am. I know where that probably leads. I’ve made peace with it, genuinely, and the peace is real.

Except for one thing.

Whenever one of my animals dies, I tell them we’ll meet again. I say it out loud, in whatever moment the moment allows — sometimes in the cold, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the end of something that took everything I had and still wasn’t enough. I tell them that La Santa Muerte will keep them safe until I get there, and that when I get there we’ll meet again.

I’ve said this to Luna, who made it back to the house on her last legs and died fifteen days later despite everything. To the cow that arrived too worn out to save. To the bull who died from the viper bite despite the treatment. To the bottle-fed sheep I kept close. To others, across six years of this work in rough conditions, too many to name, each one specific, each one carried.

I meant it every time. Not as comfort for the animal — animals can’t receive a promise as a promise, can’t hold you to it, can’t know you made it. I meant it as a commitment. A real one, made to something that couldn’t enforce it, which is the only kind of commitment that reveals whether it’s actually real.

Here’s the contradiction I can’t solve.

I am, by any honest accounting, going to hell. Not because I think the theological machinery works exactly the way any tradition describes it — I’ve written about my relationship with all of that, and it’s complicated, and La Santa Muerte is the only spiritual framework I’ve found that fits. But in the general sense, the directional sense: the place where people like me go is not the place where the innocent go, and I’ve never pretended otherwise.

And the animals — the ones I’ve lost, the ones I’ve handed to La Santa Muerte with the promise that we’ll meet again — they are innocent. Completely. Whatever innocence means, they have it. Whatever the opposite of innocent is, that’s more my direction.

Which means we might not end up in the same place.

And that — that specific possibility, that specific version of the after — is the one thing in the entire accounting that I can’t fully make peace with. Not my own destination. The animals’ destination. Whether the promise holds. Whether “we’ll meet again” was a real thing I could offer, or whether I was giving them a comfort I don’t actually have the ability to give, because where they’re going and where I’m going might not be the same.

I want to say something about why this contradiction exists and not others, because I think the reason matters.

The darkness I carry — the capacity that runs underneath everything this blog has described, that the formation installed without asking permission, that has been pointed at the right things for long enough that I’ve learned to call it mine — I’ve used it to protect them. That’s not a metaphor. The fuel that ran the engine in El Guamo, at the gate with the four men on motorcycles, in every fight for every animal in every context where fighting was what the situation required — that fuel came from the darkness. The anger, the relentlessness, the refusal to back down, the capacity for “my worst” when the fence was threatened — none of that is the light side of the good bad person. All of it is the dark side, deployed in service of something that needed it.

Which means the protecting and the damning came from the same place. The thing that might cost me the after is the same thing that kept them alive. The darkness that points me toward hell is the same darkness that kept them from it.

I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve thought about it for a long time and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not a paradox that resolves into a lesson. It’s just true, simultaneously, without either side canceling the other.

It was also fighting for them that kept me from becoming something else. Something worse. Something closer to what made me than I ever want to be.

I don’t know what I would have been without them — without the obligation of the fence, without the specific requirement that something outside myself needed protecting, without the daily reminder that the darkness I carry has to be pointed somewhere, and that the somewhere has to be worth the pointing. I don’t know what the darkness does when it has nothing to protect. I’ve never found out. I’ve never wanted to.

They saved me from finding out.

Every one of them, every morning, every feeding, every cold night and every animal that made it and every one that didn’t.

Which makes the contradiction even harder to carry: they saved me, and the saving might not be enough to get me to wherever they are, and I promised them something I might not be able to deliver.

I still believe in the promise. I want to say that plainly, because I think the piece requires it and because I think it’s true.

La Santa Muerte doesn’t rank the innocent above the guilty in the way conventional theology does — she comes for everyone, equally, without a ledger. Maybe that means the fence extends past the dying. Maybe the promise is real in a way that doesn’t depend on which direction I was heading.

Maybe the animals are waiting somewhere she holds them, and she holds me too, eventually, and the meeting happens the way I said it would.

I don’t know. I’ve never known. I’ve been honest throughout this project about the things I don’t know, and this is one of them, and I’m not going to reach for a resolution that isn’t available just because the not-knowing is uncomfortable.

What I know is this: I said it to each of them, and I meant it, and the meaning is permanent even if I can’t guarantee the delivery.

We’ll meet again.

I hope that’s enough.

I hope she keeps them well until I get there.

I hope the place I’m going and the place they’re in turns out to be, in whatever way these things work, the same place after all.

That’s the one thing. The only one. Hell is fine.

Except for that.