I hold the strings too tightly,
knuckles white, skin fraying,
pulling until they fray like brittle thread—
what is left in my hands but nothing?
They say prayer is surrender,
kneeling before the unseen
and whispering into the ether,
hoping the void has ears.
What a gamble that is,
trusting in silence to cradle your plea,
trusting the invisible
to tip the scales
and not let you fall.
Who taught us this?
The fragile audacity to believe
in what we cannot touch
but desperately need to feel.
I think of love
as a mirror without reflection.
I hold it up to the light
and nothing stares back.
Does that mean it is absent?
Or does it mean it is beyond
what mirrors know how to capture?
And then—
there is fire in the other hand.
Not the gentle warmth of candles,
but the kind of fire
that witches called upon in the dark
when they could no longer trust the gods,
when they thought
they could summon love by force.
You can say a name into the flame
and demand the heart to follow.
But what comes back is not love,
only the shadow of a wish
wrapped in illusion.
You twist the world to your will
and lose the very thing you sought—
what is the price of that?
I used these hands to conjure,
to shape what I thought love should be,
only to realize I loved them.
Not the illusion,
not the thing I called forth—
them, raw and uncoaxed.
But now,
what do you do with love
when you have already tried to force it?
How do you kneel again,
hands open,
heart bare,
and say,
"I will wait. I will trust. I will release."
The threads I once clutched
are burned now.
There is nothing to hold on to
but the absence of control.
Love, too, is prayer,
is sorcery,
is madness.
It is all of these at once.
You can kneel to it,
you can try to cast it,
but in the end,
it demands something more terrifying—
the leap.
The fall.
The giving up
when everything in you screams to hold on.
Let it go,
I tell myself.
But my hands tremble,
my thoughts spin in circles,
and I wonder
if there is a way
to trust
without breaking.
or
I clutch the edge of everything
as if the world were a sheet I could pull taut,
as if holding tighter could keep it from slipping.
But the thread unravels,
the weave loosens,
and still, my fingers refuse to let go.
What is surrender if not an act of violence
against the self that demands control?
I kneel—
not to gods I know,
not to a face in the sky or a voice in the dark.
I kneel to the unknown,
to the deafening silence of maybe.
Prayer is a gamble, isn't it?
The greatest trust fall—
to throw words into an abyss
and believe something waits on the other side
to catch them.
I whisper into the nothing:
"Take this. Take me. Make sense of it all."
And then wait.
And wait.
And wait.
But what if there is no answer?
What if love is the same?
What if it, too, is just
a question shouted into an empty room,
the echo sounding so much like a yes
that you convince yourself it's real?
Do you leap anyway?
Do you risk the crash?
I thought I could bend love—
not ask for it, but take it.
I thought the old ways, the secret ways,
would twist the air around us
until it sang the song I needed.
I called your name into the dark.
I lit the candle.
I burned the herbs,
tied the knot,
closed my eyes,
and pulled.
You looked at me.
I felt the weight shift,
the spark ignite.
But it wasn't real, was it?
You felt what I wanted you to feel,
not what you wanted to.
I created a version of you
and fell in love with it.
Not you.
Not really.
And then I saw you.
Not the spell, not the illusion,
but you.
The real, unshaped truth of you,
and I realized
that I would relinquish everything,
even my power,
even my fear,
to love you the way the world loves the ocean:
helplessly.
But now, how do I stand before you?
How do I say, "I tried to force you,
to make you something
you were never meant to be,
and now I must trust
what I have no power to touch"?
Trust is the absence of magic.
Trust is the death of control.
Trust is standing at the edge of a cliff
with a heart full of hope and a mind full of fear,
saying, "I love you.
I am here.
Do with me what you will."
Prayer, love, sorcery—
they are all the same.
All of them acts of reckless belief,
wild submission,
the choice to leap
and let the universe decide
if you will soar
or shatter.
So I kneel,
not to gods, not to spells,
but to you.
To the truth of you.
And for the first time,
I let my hands fall open.
I let go.
