I used to fold my hands like that meant something like posture could persuade silence into answering back

I spoke softly at first like you were sleeping like reverence was a password I hadn't typed correctly yet

but nothing cam

No sign, no voice no crack in the sky spilling meaning into my lap just the same fucking quiet wearing a different mask

And her

she said have faith like it was something you could borrow like belief wasn't a locked door with no handle on my side

She looks up and sees intention in everything every coincidence a whisper every sunrise a signature

I look up and see weather

She says you're there in the spaces between suffering

I say you're hiding them

Tell me what kind of god needs this much guessing?

What kind of truth demands I pretend until it feels real

I asked for something small not miracles, not heaven just a sliver of proof that I'm not talking to the ceiling

But the ceiling never answers

And she keeps believing like the silence is sacred like unanswered prayers are just answers in disguise

I'm tired of disguises

If you're there say it plainly

Break something burn a hole in the doubt call me out by name like you mean it

because I'm done kneeling for a voice that doesn't speak done begging meaning out of absence

and if faith is the test

then maybe I'm failing on purpose

i spend the better half of my childhood and late teens believing love was this wonderful feeling. this sweet warmth. this beautiful soft thing. something that just feels right. i spend most of my life believing love was a feeling. an experience that ends in marriage and family and a life joined with someone. it was a fantasy of love. something i’d made up. something the world told me was real.

but i learnt something in the ending of my first long term relationship. i learnt that the kind of ideas about love that i was fed as a child felt suffocating. they trapped me. they told me the only acceptable form of love was to give myself away to someone. and as someone who has always struggled with the question of who i was as well as being incredibly independent simultaneously. i was face with a choice. do i keep letting my person be who i am or do i find someone (if anyone) who would never impose a codependent identity.

i learnt something selfish about myself. my dreams do not contain anyone else, they contain me and only me. and the relationship i was in required me to share and change those dreams. and honestly as self absorbed as it seems, i do not think you should have to compromise who you are and who you want to be for the sake of love.

i found that love can be all those soft things that i had been fantasising about, it can be that feeling. but more than anything love is an action, a choice. and to choose someone else over myself is not worth love.

so moving forward i am me, at the front of who i am is my dreams and anyone who wishes to love me must accept that they come second. and anyone who i wish to love must realise thats what i want for them also. i wish not to be their world. i wish to be a witness to their dreams and i wish for them to be a witness to mine.