I Begged God for You to Stay

I begged God for you to stay.

Not once.
Not in passing.
I begged the way people beg
when something inside them knows
it is already gone.

You didn't just leave.
You collapsed something in me.

Not loudly.
Not all at once.

But like a ceiling
that had been cracking for years
finally giving in.

You found the places
I held together with silence
and pulled.

And still, I prayed.

I prayed for your footsteps
to hesitate at the door.
For something in your chest
to ache the way mine did.
For your name
to turn back toward me
before it became memory.

I didn't pray for justice.

I didn't even pray for healing.

I prayed
for the version of you
that never would have done this,
the one who held me
like I was not temporary,
like I was not something
you could survive without.

Maybe that is the cruelest shape of love.

Not that it hurts,
but that it remembers
how it once didn't.

So even after the wound,
even after the silence settles
where your voice used to live,
we kneel.

Not for the one who broke us, the ghost
of who they were
when they were gentle.

I begged God for you to stay.

Not because you deserved it.
Not because I didn't see
what you had done.

But because my heart,
still standing in the wreckage you left,
did not yet understand

how something
that once felt like home

could become
something
it had to survive.