The Veil

The architecture was grand, built of stones I did not quarry and mortar mixed before I was born. I walked the hallways of a history written in someone else’s cursive, believing the walls were solid, believing the view from the window was the only sky that existed.

Then came the light— not a soft dawning, but a sharp, clinical glare that turned the stone to paper and the mortar to dust. I watched the pink ribbons drift through the rafters of a collapsing house, and for a moment, the silence felt like the end of the world.

It is easy to stand in the ruins and mistake the debris for your identity. It is easy to grow old clutching the jagged edges of a broken story, using the shards to cut anyone who tries to come close.

But I have seen the man in the forest, his heart turned to winter, his eyes seeing only the shadow behind every neighbor’s smile. I refuse that inheritance.

The veil did not fall to leave me blind; it fell so I could finally see. My faith was never stored in the pockets of those who lied. It was not a structural beam in that house of cards.

So I walk out from the rubble, leaving the false scripts to the wind. The sky is wider than they told me. The ground is firmer than I feared. I am not the lie they whispered— I am the truth that survived it.