i learned to kneel before i learned to ask why. The words were already there when i arrived — inherited like a name I didn't choose. i uttered them anyway. i repeated them because saying them was safer than the silence underneath, and because the dread had a shape only when i stopped speaking.

 

There was a comfort in obedience i mistake, even now, for peace. Someone else had already decided what i was for. i didn't have to hold the weight of my own meaning — i only had to carry the doctrine, and the doctrine carried me. i told myself this was faith. It was closer to sleep.

 

But dread doesn't stay quiet forever. It waits in the pauses between prayers, in the moment after the last word is said and nothing answers back. i began to notice the shape of what i was kneeling to — not a presence, but an absence wearing the clothes of one. And once you see the seams, you cannot unsee them. You can only keep kneeling, and call it devotion, or you can stand — unsteady, unfinished — and call it the beginning of something you don't have a name for yet.