We don’t talk like how we used to. I know it’s my fault. I just don’t have much to say. I’m silently suffering. I’m like a church full of stained glass that shattered- still beautiful and pigmented. All piecing together a story that was once told through a window. It’s still a place of worship. You pick up the pieces daintily and don’t know what to do with them. That was the first goodbye.

I keep thinking about friendship and how it’s sacred to me. Then there’s this layer in between where I fill in the gaps. Those are the parts of me that are growing deeper. It’s almost hollow, but not quite. It’s every saint that watched me stumble and bust open my lip for talking badly about myself- and everyone knows I’m a sinner because they’re sinners too. And I know I’m on a lot of peoples minds, but they’ll feel better about it in a few weeks, I fucking promise. Forgiveness sprawls out around me and turns into a playground for the wolves to stay hungry. They need some sort of closure too- and even though I don’t bother locking the door, somehow they never get in.

There’s a haunting in holiness and I express this through everything I do. It’s trapped in between sentences and scenes I don’t write about. My own reminder that surviving doesn’t always happen when you’re about to die- sometimes it happens when you’re about to live. I think that’s the point in all this messiness. Tonight I watched the old church go up in flames. Stained glass sticking to pavement like lava. Watch it stretch across the farmland and melt to the earth- letting it know how permanent of a mark a saint can make. See ashes rising in the distance as the sirens wash over the town. I swear I don’t even smell the smoke.