The cathedral didn’t fall in a night.
It went stone by stone, a quiet heist of the heart,
until the ribs of the vault were just
bleached bones against a bruising sky.
I started with the rafters,
the heavy timber of "always" and "never,"
unpinning the certainties I’d inherited
like oversized coats from dead ancestors.
They were warm, once, but they never quite fit
the reach of my own arms.
Next came the glass.
I watched the saints shatter into primary colors,
red for the blood I no longer understood,
blue for a heaven that felt like a locked door.
I found that light still pours through the gaps,
unfiltered by lead or the stories of martyrs,
and it hits the floor with a much sharper heat.
Now, I sit in the ruins.
There is no roof to keep out the rain,
no walls to echo the hymns I used to hum
to keep the dark from tasting like salt.
It is drafty. It is lonely. It is terrifyingly wide.
But I am learning the names of the weeds
growing between the floorboards,
and I am finding that the ground,
stripped of its altar and its velvet,
is still solid enough to hold
the weight of a person
who is finally,
breathlessly,
unsure.
