Between Bruises & Blooms

The church still stands.

White paint peeling like old skin, its steeple piercing a sky too blue to remember mourning.

They say no one worships here anymore.

But I know better.

The crows keep the choir.

The wind recites forgotten scripture through cracked boards, and every groan of old timber is another hymn the living have forgotten.

I walked the path alone, where countless footsteps have long since turned to dust.

The doors remained shut.

Not to keep me out—

but to keep something in.

There are prayers that never reached heaven.

Confessions that still cling to the rafters.

Candles burned themselves to ghosts, wax hardening like tears on an altar no one tends.

Yet every evening, when the sun slips behind the trees, the stained shadows awaken.

The church breathes.

Its bell, silent for decades, still rings somewhere beneath the ribs of those who remember.

I do not fear abandoned churches.

I fear the ones that look alive.

The ones filled with smiling faces while something ancient starves beneath the floorboards.

This place…

This forgotten cathedral…

has already buried its demons.

Now it simply waits,

patient as the grave,

for someone brave enough to mistake silence

for peace.