After the Fall

At first,

the pain felt godless

an error in creation,

a cruel game of Monopoly.

I searched it for meaning

and found only absence.

Surely this was not the will of God.

Surely nothing from heaven lived here.

I called it unnecessary.

A punishment.

I called it theft

I did not know yet,

that Gods intimate touch

can only be felt

by letting the veil tear.

Or the petals fall.

Years later,

I see what the wound was performing

while I was busy feeling it’s slow burn.

I am whole now— refined.

Joy finds me in the crumbs of the tiniest details,

Deity in the small things.

I have learned to number my days

because time is no longer abstract

it is sacrament.

I feel people more

like sharing a foreign language,

even with the ugly soul.

Their sorrow does not frighten me.

I’m not threatened by their rage.

I recognize it.

I simmer with its words,

that it doesn’t know how to say.

This, too, is a gift.

Maybe it’s the tree I was never meant to eat from.

Knowledge tasted like exile.

Lost in Eden.

But God did not abandon the garden.

He made sense of it,

a translation, a doctrine,

for us to see the mystery that reveals our reflections all along.

Little reflections of His face.

What He faced.

The pain did not make sense then—

it was not meant to.

Mystery is not the absence of God,

but His refusal to be reduced.

What I called cruelty

became clarity.

What I called ruin

became sight.

I did not fall apart.

I fell in place.

And this is the miracle:

that God wastes nothing—

not even the ache

that taught me how to love.