When the Veil Thinned

I woke when the night was almost finished,
when the mind loosens its grip
on the stories it has repeated all its life.

The old language came first.

Cherubim with their flaming swords.
The closed garden.
The ladder of angels rising and falling.

I knew these images well.
They had shaped my childhood.

But something had changed.

The room was quiet.
No wind, no voice from heaven.
Only the thin breathing of morning.

Anger rose in me then,
like the serpent returning again and again
with the same fruit.

I had tasted it a thousand times.

Every sweetness
turning bitter afterward.

Slowly I understood
what had been happening.

The visions I carried
were made of longing.

The stories written in my bones
were older than I was.

Blood must be spilled.
Pain must be holy.
Love must suffer to be true.

So the scroll unrolled within me
and I read it again
with different eyes.

I held those beliefs for a moment
as one might hold small broken idols.

Not devils.

Only the shapes fear takes
when it wants protection.

Then I let them go.

Into the wilderness of the mind
where old gods wander
after they lose their temples.

The silence that followed
was not empty.

It was wide.

For the first time
I spoke the names of those who hurt me
without asking heaven to judge them.

And something loosened.

Not forgiveness exactly.

But the ending of the old trial
I had been conducting for years.

Outside the sky was growing pale.

No angel appeared.
No stone rolled away.

Only the ordinary morning
entering the room.

And I understood then

that what remains
when the stories fall silent

is not revelation

but the difficult mercy
we make ourselves.