A regret

You are just like my town’s gothic church where I took first communion ages ago, professing a faith that now I see was never any genuine. You are decades of stone upon stone in careful solidness with a sharp and dark index finger pointing to (according to the prayer it took me a while to catch during mass and likely whispered in vain in the few times I took the trouble to do so) what I should aspire to and yet never quite feel worthy of, little as I am.

You are tall walls with a ceiling which remind me of how looking straight at the sky for too long rends me dizzy and breathless, as though I was drowning, pushing me mercilessly back to the ground. You are fearing whispered silences in neutral colors among the echoes of my own steps; tiny shimmering rays of sunshine coming through the few and distant narrow stained-glass windows in an attempt to blow up a new spark of life into objects that I mostly remember under rather annoyingly pale artificial lighting.

You are like the figures, always quite tall and imponent in their graceful and dutiful stagedly static postures and their eyes on slightly bent heads peering over me in expressions of scary and rather depressing over-the-top melancholy in a purity that does not let me return their gaze properly.

Some hiding in the shadows of a few corners, their dead bodies shown as the first step into the holiness of their official representations right above, longing in a sort of neglected jealousy for devotees who certainly more easily remember the Madona the place was named after for her strategic centered place above the altar in what should be the sky an aldult and agonizing version of her famous son turns his head towards a bit sideways.

Others, humble in their popularity, dare to stand near the door for a chance of quick worship in an hour of deep need. Others don’t seem to mind their seats without flowers, for they know their places in Heaven for what the y are told to have done on earth. You are every flower at their feet, you are the wood of the pews hoping not to vacilate under the weight of so many sinful pairs of knees bent in prayers of repent, sincere or not.

You are the golden emergency lights turned on a long confession day that soon became night over the wait for a last excited word and instruction from the priest for the Big Sunday, when he recalls childhood in gestures of big hands and strong voice in the middle of that majestic darkness like the angel from the Revelations; like a dream, quiet and eerie in a way, with no defining shape, causing my heart to pound within my chest and my voice to hesitate while I spoke to the girl next to me. You are like the so-called home of a god I may have never believed in, although I tried. You are the red timid light I was taught the angel held to indicate the spiritual presence of the man over the cross.