I once believed
suffering could be sanctified.
That patience was a cathedral
and mercy the quiet candle
that outlived the storm.
I knelt in the rubble of your chaos
and called it devotion.
I carried your sins like relics,
polished your excuses into scripture,
and swallowed the nails
you mistook for kindness.
I was gentle then.
A man who mistook endurance for virtue,
who believed love meant
letting wolves gnaw the bone
until nothing remained but prayer.
You knew that man.
You knew the saint in me.
How he forgave before the knife was drawn,
how he built altars from apologies
and lit them with the last dry wood
of his own ribs.
And you fed on him.
Slowly.
Patiently.
The way rot studies a cathedral
before it decides which beam
to hollow first.
You called it misunderstanding.
You called it love.
You called it my duty
to bleed quietly.
So I bled.
Years of it.
A quiet martyrdom
no heaven ever bothered to witness.
But saints are only holy
until the crowd learns
how easy it is to crucify them.
The night the last mercy left my bones
I heard something break.
Not loudly,
not like thunder.
more like the soft snap
of a halo
falling to the floor.
And suddenly I understood:
You did not want my forgiveness.
You wanted my silence.
You did not love the man I was.
Only the wounds you could reopen.
So here we are.
The prayers are gone.
The altars are ash.
The man who turned the other cheek
has buried his hands
deep in the dirt of the world
and learned how to make stone.
Do not mourn him.
You killed the saint in me
with a thousand careful betrayals,
each one small enough
to pretend it wasn’t ******
But understand this:
The saint is dead, yes.
And the man who stands here now
no longer believes
suffering makes you holy.
Only strong.