I
I tore my throat raw, hurling despair into the cracked heights, which repaid every exhalation with frozen silence.
I bloodied my wrists against the vault of the universe, wrenching from the void even a shadow of Your presence.
The world collapsed into a chilled, windowless room, where an orphaned cry beats against the walls, echoing.
Why did You cast me to the mercy of blind gravity, which presses my knees into indifferent matter?
Every deaf wall is a merciless witness to Your flight, a divine imprint erased forever.
Struck from the memory of the cosmos, abandoned to swallow the vacuum in which every bearing has gone dark.
II
Sharp angles and planes rise in memory,
where my own hands forged the causes of parting.
Those doors, with a creak, in despair I shut myself,
and hid my weary heart from the light in the shadows.
Boundlessness frightened me, freedom blinded unbearably,
the leap into nowhere, discord with my deepest essence.
Dark and heavy, unbelief settled in my pupils,
I locked my soul in cramped and deaf stone chambers.
My throat contracted, shackled in the vice of silence,
where the last plea fell like a stone into the dark.
And in place of prayer – the aftertaste of bitter refusal:
I deprived both myself and the sky of empty speech.
III
A step.
Mine alone.
A conscious retreat.
My own abyss.
My feet measure
the black chasm.
Heaven is open.
Heaven was waiting.
There are no bounds.
It was I who walled up
the mute ceiling,
the concrete shell,
the inner cell.
A ribcage echo.
Reproach ricochets,
strikes clean through,
rips open the gut.
The gaze cast down.
Empty palms.
Compressed pain.
Cracked lips.
A strangled whisper:
— Why did I…
renounce You?