Lost in the patience

There is a kind of hunger the body learns that has nothing to do with bread.

It lives in the hollow places where names used to sit, and it whistles through the ribs like wind through an abandoned barn.

Down here, time is not a river.

It is a dirt road that forgets where it started but keeps on going anyway.

I have seen men chase their own shadows just to prove they are still behind them.

I have seen women pray into kettles of silence waiting for something to rise that never learned how to answer.

The heart is a stubborn animal in this old Southern light.

It runs toward what breaks it like a moth taught the flame is mercy, like a fly convinced the web is a hymn it was born to understand.

And still it goes.

Lord, it still goes.

There is something holy in the pursuit, even when it bleeds.

Even when it forgets the shape of arriving and calls the running itself salvation.

We were raised on front porch sermons about prodigal roads and returning dust, about rivers that wash you clean only after they drown what you thought you were.

But no one told us that longing is also inheritance.

That some of us are born already mid-knock, already mid-call, already leaning toward a door that may not exist except in the leaning.

The fields know it.

The dogs know it.

Even the cracked paint on the church steps knows what it is to wait for something that never promised to come.

And still the hymn continues, crooked and beautiful, coming out of throats that have forgotten rest.

Because in the end, the human condition is not arrival.

It is pursuit.

It is the ache that keeps its boots on long after the road has gone quiet.

It is the soul walking forward anyway,

calling it hope,

calling it grace,

calling it by any name that will let it keep moving through the long, unlit mercy of being alive.