Pray without end

I do not ask You for light, O Lord, but for the shadow that remembers it once was light, that darkness with memory, trembling in the corners of being like a wounded golden memory. I do not ask for forgiveness but for the understanding of why I collapse again and again in the same place, with the same fear, with the same unfinished wound in my chest. I do not kneel from faith, but from the weariness of words that no longer know how to fly, gathering in me like warm ash, clothing my soul like the dust of a sacred road. I imagine You as a forgotten question on the lips of those long gone. Perhaps You dwell where thought fades, in the stillness between two breaths, in the moment that hesitates, in the unfinished gesture of the angel who stopped before becoming flame. Do not send me signs, Lord. I have grown used to Your absences— the only truths that never lie. Presences change faces, but You, You are always absent in the same way: like a seed that gave up on the promise of becoming a flower. Or am I, perhaps, a grain of sand planted in Your garden, unaware of what germination feels like? Forgive me not for my sins, but for what I might have become and lacked the courage to be. You placed a path within my chest, and I chose the silence that no longer echoes. My prayer is not a voice, but a sigh hidden between ribs— a child born in famine, fed with dreams and cradled by false promises. Do not see me as a broken vessel, but as clay that has yet to decide whether to become urn or temple. Perhaps I am merely the memory of a potter worn out by so many beginnings. I built a religion from Your silence, a monastery of patience from Your distance. And if You do not come, I will still wait for You, in every choice that wounds me. I fear salvation… its garment far too white for one who has lived cloaked in the rags of a guilt grown carefully, like a rare plant. But if You are— do not leave. Not tonight. Not now, when my doubt has learned to be measured and not just desperate. Receive me, not as a supplicant, but as a thought that entered the wrong body. Perhaps You won’t understand me, but perhaps that very thing is enough to know that You are God.