V. Brittle Pulpits

Trauma echoes

longer than sermons.

I held my childhood

up to the light

and watched it bleed

truth and hurt

in equal measure.

I saw pastors condemn

as they consumed,

priests preach purity

with putrid breath,

leaders build kingdoms

on fear

and call it

faithfulness.

The world cracked—

politics, piety,

my own mind

splitting like fragile ice

until a doctor prescribed it

a name

and I wore it

like a scar.

We couldn’t conceive.

We lost money,

lost footing,

lost sleep to grief

and shame

and the quiet ache of

what have we done wrong?

Old certainties collapsed

like brittle pulpits.

I mourned

not just beliefs

but the childhood

I spent guarding gates

to a kingdom

I didn’t know

I was already inside.

I picked apart

every thought

until faith felt like

a frayed thread

in my shaking hands.

My wife became victim

of my trauma

and malady.

She held too much of me—

the sorrow,

the fear,

the boy who still trembled in the dark

long after he outgrew his childhood room.

I loved her fiercely,

and still

I let the wildfire in me

burn at the edges of her peace

until she carried smoke

in her own lungs.

Guilt taught me leaving

could look like love,

so I left—

believing distance

might save her

from drowning

in the undertow of my breaking.

But absence is not anesthesia.

It cuts deeper.

It teaches loneliness in a tongue

more ancient than prayer.

We returned to one another

once—

like two exiles

still wearing ashes,

hands trembling

as we tried to rebuild

something sacred

from ruin.

We learned slow tenderness,

traded confessions like currency,

held one another

not as rescuer and rescued

but as pilgrims

still bruised from the road,

still reaching for light.

For a season,

healing softened us.

Hope stitched what grief had torn.

And then—

the voice that once called me

home

became the torrent

of new truth:

love isn’t enough.

Under that weight,

I snapped.

There are heartbreaks

that do not shatter—

they hollow.

They carve out rooms inside the chest

which swallow the light

long after the leaving.

I died quietly then,

in a place without altar or witness,

learning there are losses

even prayer cannot resurrect—

only carry

like a fracture beneath the ribs

where breath once lived unbroken.

Soon, I envied

what I never tasted—

wild youth,

reckless wonder,

unquestioned joy.

And in the wake

of all I tore down,

I whispered to a God

I wasn’t sure

was listening:

If You are still here,

be found in the rubble.