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When you were born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around your neck.
That is what your mother seemed to have said—though it is a story too distant now. Her flesh and bones have returned to the earth, peeled away from your memory, her face losing the shape of its features. You once had a sweet time together, but that too is an old story, overly unfamiliar. Did you truly lie with your head in her lap, eyes closed, listening to a fable, a few nursery rhymes?
“When you were born, the cord was wrapped around your neck. I thought you would not survive.”
She may truly have said that, with a mother’s authority and a smile you could not understand, as if it were a kind of blessing.
If you were to say it yourself: it was a foreknowledge of your death, present at the moment of birth.
Your life is a particularly unfortunate story. You would rather the cord had killed you outright—ended a child incapable of happiness before he ever learned suffering—than for you to have lived as you did, tying a knot in a rope, pulling it into a loop, fitting your jaw into this man-made instrument of self-destruction, just to escape the shame of past, present, and future.
You cannot dissolve this sin. Suicide is not atonement. It does not erase the stench of coins from your hands. You simply could not endure being judged both from within and without.
What were you thinking when you saw the tree?
You could still think then—using the merciless mind of a merchant, weighing and calculating the shattered reality before you. It told you that you were finished. Thirty pieces of silver were worth nothing at all, and you had not even destroyed yourself for the silver. Judas of Kerioth, who imagined that concession could save a people—you became the shame of that people.
You could no longer belong anywhere. The Pharisees always strip the meat from the bone and discard the rest. The Twelve would hate you—they already did. And word traveled too fast: in every Jewish mouth, traitor would become synonymous with Judas.
Thus you ceased to belong to humanity, and your heart no longer belonged to you.
From the moment the seed of doubt was planted, your heart cried out that you loved Him. Yes. Yes. Damn it—you loved Jesus. But everyone was meant to love Jesus. Your heart said you loved Him, and that you should not harm Him for the sake of someone unimportant—
How could it be unimportant? In truth, it was unimportant. Only a dull mind that believed itself clever would think otherwise.
Traitor Judas, you betrayed your own heart as well.
The betrayer who repents and hangs himself—this makes for a didactic parable, if nothing else. Too naked, perhaps.
Did you repent?
Absurd. From the moment the money pouch fell into your hands, you were obsessed, every second, with arguing against yourself—insisting that you regretted betraying your rabbi. Yet you knew well that no matter what choice you made, you would regret it. Had you remained loyal and disaster followed, you would still have regretted it.
You simply could not bear Jesus’ blood—could not bear it between your eyes and His, across that fence, across the lashes and the nails that began with you. Blood and tears flowed from those eyes like the land of milk and honey in the stories. You could not look. You could not continue living.
And in that single glance, you saw no hatred, no disappointment, none of the punishment you craved for your sin.
So you punished yourself in place of your teacher of three years.
You could not stone yourself—but there were easier methods.
Leaving the crowd behind, you walked into the wilderness. There were few people along the way. You were about to die; moral instruction no longer mattered. The rope you took—called found, but truly stolen—may the Lord bless that household. You were unworthy of blessing, and therefore unrestrained.
Every thug knows that suicides go to hell. You followed this vulgar certainty onward. The desert reminded you of your rabbi’s stories: the waiting, the asceticism, the temptations that turned the Son of Man into the Son of God. And you, here, sought nothing noble—only a suitable tree, so you could leave everything behind.
It is said that hell and the mortal world do not share a reckoning of time—or rather, that hell and heaven know no time at all. All measure is eternity, like bread that remains itself even when sliced.
Lucifer visited often, tasting the flesh of sinners, tasting betrayal upon you, tasting what he called pain. You do not know why you were still able to think. Losing eyes again and again, flesh and bone torn away and regrown—such things should drive a man mad. Lucifer mocked you for it.
“So lucid it’s contemptible,” he said. “Worthy of the one who betrayed the Son of God.”
By the time the rhythmic torments ended, roughly an eternity had passed. What remained was older pain—the pain you had tried to escape through hanging. It was madness. It belonged to your heart.
You hated all of it.
But you could not resist. You could not refuse the Son of God.
Devils, humans, and angels all said the same thing: the Son of God rose three days after the crucifixion. Yet the pain you sought had clearly lasted an eternity already.
When He came to you, you did not know it. The timing was cruelly precise—you had not yet regrown your gouged eyes, your torn flesh, when the palm of God touched your blood, and you were made whole again.
Your body was complete and naked, as if untouched by injury, though beneath the gaze of the Son of God, your neck still ached faintly. You did not touch it. You could not even stand; your legs were too newly returned. When you began to fall, He caught you.
“Judas, my Judas. Come back with Me.”
Jesus—His body also whole—said this. He could have commanded you. You knew that God could do such things. His palm was warm, like magma from purgatory, yet it did not burn.
You had grown accustomed to your tongue again, yet you remained silent, not knowing how to answer. You were joyful at first—He was unharmed—then memory returned: the fear of eternity, of the world, of yourself, overpowering all else. You shrank back, hunched your spine, seized the hand that rested on your shoulder and kissed it.
Only then did you realize He was not unharmed.
The center of His palm was still rough. Dried blood lay beneath the skin. The holes from the nails were still there.
Your legs failed you again. You collapsed to your knees before Him, head bowed deeply. How could you dare look at Him—let alone into His eyes?
“You should not have come, Rabbi. You should not have… You still bear the marks of my sin. I am unworthy of another chance…”
You suddenly remembered walking with Jesus while alive, remembered what He would say. And you could not accept it.
“I forgive you, Judas.”
“No—!” You nearly screamed, kneeling like a feral dog that does not recognize goodness. “I cannot… You cannot… I chose this place, Rabbi. Do you understand?”
He was perhaps frowning gently, or wearing that merciful smile beloved of gods. You dared not look.
“Yes. You chose to flee—to flee to a place you believed I would not enter—so that you could safely dwell in your sin without repentance.”
His hand rested on your crown as it always had, pressing into the newly grown curls.
“I remember. You wore your hair like this before.”
There was laughter in His voice—not the kind you despised.
“I did not dwell in my sin, Rabbi,” you said slowly, without the pitiful trembling of before. “I am guilty, so—”
“The sin of betrayal, I forgive. The sin of hanging—can you forgive yourself?”
He lifted your chin gently and kissed your bare forehead. Jesus’ kiss. His fingers traced your jaw, then the curve of your neck. Only then did you realize it was still uneven, as though indented by the umbilical cord.
“We must go,” He said, touching your hand.
Judas rose four days after the crucifixion of the Son of God.
As you expected, your mind and your heart continued to devour one another. In the name of profit, in the name of love—you no longer deserved life.