After Prayer

I went where the light was arranged
to resemble mercy.
Candles, the slow lift of smoke,
a voice rising just enough
to make you think something was listening.

I knelt because I knew how.
The body remembers
what the mind has begun to doubt.

For a moment there was relief,
not peace exactly,
but a loosening,
as if the self could be set down
and left there.

It did not last.

The words I spoke
fell back through me
like water through open hands.
Nothing held.

I had called it hunger for God.
I had called it longing,
grace in its early form.

But in the quiet after,
something harder spoke:

You are asking the silence
to become a voice.

I tried again.
Different prayers,
different names.

The same stillness.

It gathered around me
until it was no longer absence
but fact.

Not cruel.
Not kind.

Simply there.

And I began to see
how much of what I carried
had been made
to answer that silence,

the shape of my hope,
the weight of my fear,
the need to believe
the wound meant something.

When that loosened,
there was no revelation.

Only this:

the room,
the dim light,
my hands
empty of what I thought they held.

And the strange persistence
of being here
without it.