Where the Moths Go to Pray

They came at twilight, slow and solemn, like parishioners returning to a ruined church. Dozens of them—hundreds, maybe. Their powdery wings whispered against the glass of my bedroom window, a murmur of prayers I couldn’t understand.

I watched them from the floor, cross-legged, surrounded by the silence that had taken over my grandmother’s house since the funeral. The air was thick with dust and dried lavender, and the scent clung to everything, even my thoughts.

She had always said moths were messengers.

“They remember what we forget,” she once told me as she stitched faded lace onto the hem of a dress that no longer fit her. “They gather it up in their wings and carry it to where memory still burns.”

At the time, I’d been too young to ask what she meant. Now I was old enough to wonder if grief rewrote the laws of the world, or if the world had always been written in ink invisible to the living.

That night, after the moths came, I couldn’t sleep.

I followed them instead.

Down the long, creaking hallway. Past the room where her knitting needles still sat in a silent plea for completion. Through the back door that stuck in summer and groaned in winter. Into the garden that hadn’t been touched since she left.

The moonlight silvered everything—petals, stones, even my fingertips. But it was the old glass greenhouse, forgotten behind the apple tree, that glowed like a beacon.

The door was already open.

Inside, the moths circled gently above an abandoned table. Ferns had burst through the floor tiles. Ivy hung from the rafters like cathedral banners. The air was thick with humidity and the scent of soil and age.

And there—at the center—was her chair.

Not a ghost of her, exactly. But the shape of her absence. An indentation in the dust. A sense of presence just beyond reach.

The moths settled one by one, onto the table, the chair, the windows, their wings closing like folded hands.

I stepped inside.

I don’t know what I expected—a revelation, maybe. A message in the whisper of wings. But there was only quiet. Until I noticed the notebook.

She had kept it hidden under a loose floor tile. She said it was “just garden notes,” but I’d never seen her write anything without poetry leaking into the corners.

I lifted it, careful, reverent. The moths didn’t move.

Inside were pages filled with lists of plants—Latin names, planting dates, bloom patterns. But interspersed were odd sentences, scattered like seeds:

They pray with their wings.

Some flowers grow best in sorrow.

Memory is a kind of root—it stretches deeper in the dark.

And then, on the final page:

“When I am gone, follow them. They will show you the room where grief becomes something else.”

I closed the notebook and the light in the greenhouse flickered—not electric light, but something more ancient. The moths rose all at once, like breath held too long finally exhaled.

And I followed them.

They led me past the garden, beyond the edge of the property, through trees that bowed like old gatekeepers. Down a path I didn’t remember from childhood. Into a clearing lit not by moon or stars, but by the soft glow of their bodies.

It was not a place, really, but a feeling made manifest.

A space between here and there.

In the center stood a tree I couldn’t name, its bark etched with words in no language I knew. Moths blanketed its branches like blossom. Beneath it, offerings—old photographs, wilted flowers, buttons, rings, scraps of cloth. Someone had left a violin string. Someone else, a baby’s shoe.

I stepped closer and left her notebook there.

The moths did not scatter. They welcomed it.

And then I understood.

This was the chapel.

Not for worship, but for remembering.

For mourning what had passed—and letting it pass.

For returning pieces of ourselves we no longer needed to carry.

A breeze stirred, though no wind blew. The tree sighed. The moths took flight again, spiraling skyward until they disappeared into the dark.

I don’t remember walking home. Only the sudden quiet of my bedroom as I climbed into bed and fell into a dreamless sleep for the first time in weeks.

The next morning, the moths were gone.

But something had shifted.

The house didn’t feel as hollow. Her chair didn’t ache as much. The garden, though still wild, hummed with quiet promise.

Grief hadn’t left me.

But it had changed shape.

Now it fluttered in corners, silent and watchful. It sat beside me without suffocating. It left room for laughter to return, and songs to be hummed while folding laundry.

And sometimes, at dusk, I leave a lantern burning in the greenhouse.

In case they come back.

To remind me.

That memory has wings.

And that somewhere, in a place beyond maps, there is a tree where sorrow blossoms into prayer.