Cathedral

My body is an echoing cathedral built on shifting ground,

its stained-glass windows warping every color

into something sharper than light.

When I walk inside myself,

the floorboards remember every hesitation.

They creak with the weight of ghosts

I never meant to invite.

There is a river that runs through me,

thin as a wire,

carrying reflections I do not recognize.

The water keeps rewriting my silhouette,

shaving truths into angles,

turning softness into a language

I am told I should be ashamed to speak.

Some days the current carves me hollow;

other days it leaves me overflowing

with a grief I cannot name.

I have tried to stand still,

but the mirrors in this cathedral—

the ones I never hung—

bend their own sermons over me.

They are devout in their distortions,

teaching me that devotion

means shrinking to fit their gospel.

Their silence is a choir,

hymns humming through rib and bone,

asking me to become less

so the world may call it more.

There is a hunger in these walls,

but it is not for food.

It is for erasure—

the way a shadow longs to thin

when the sun climbs too high.

It asks for the kind of worship

that require sacrifice of the self.

Yet beneath the altar,

buried under years of chiseling myself

into an acceptable outline,

there is a small, unpolished truth—

a stone refusing to be carved down.

When I touch it,

I remember I was not born a cathedral.

I was born a field—

wide, breathing, unmeasured—

and someone taught me to build walls,

not realizing they were teaching me to trap my own sunlight.

And maybe someday

I will let the glass shatter,

let the river flood the aisles,

let the walls relearn softness.

Maybe I will stop mistaking

the ache of emptiness

for the ache of holiness.

Maybe I will become a field again—

nothing to worship,

nothing to judge,

only space,

only sky,

only a body finally learning,

to belong to itself.