He turns 33. His Jesus year. According to him. Apt, I’d say.

He was a cathedral I wandered into, half-curious, half-lost. Charming in his own way, forgettable unless you wander inside. There was stained glass, cracked, the fractures reflecting light. Asymmetrical, crumbling. But warm and comforting, like half a smile. The saints were covered with purple cloth, as if perpetually Lent, poised towards easter.

He thought himself as an altar. And perhaps he was. His religion was a gun he no longer believed in, but still painstakingly cleaned, as if someday he could trust the barrel again. He allowed me to lit my candles and say my prayers. Only for myself, never for him.

He mistook rest for love and I mistook want for longing. The silence was holy then but grew sour. Waiting, always waiting. Silent and late gods made for awful idols and I knew it was time to go. Before he arrives. It was always a race, you see. Even if he didn’t know it yet.

You will hear about it, from him. As myth, as his hero Spinoza laughing like a madman, as verse Kierkegaard on mushrooms might spit out, as a line Hemingway passed out sober would bleed. He would say that I cast him from paradise and exiled him from home. That I said nothing while tearing his gods down. That I left him with stardust in his eyes, and maybe even something like love.

The truth, at least mine, was simpler, crueler. He wanted scripture made flesh but I was just flesh he made scripture. He wanted everlasting but damned us in his haste.

So I left while the choir was mid-song. Thought he didn’t see but when I turned back, he was expecting it. I left him to his prayers, knowing he’d call it abandonment. Maybe he was right. Maybe he deserved it.

Before leaving, I left him a gift he will never admit to needing. The fires consumed the cathedral, but the ruin, he needed to keep writing.

—

here’s how I want them to write me but they wouldn’t, so I’ll do it instead.

And, uh, happy birthday to me, I guess.