Church Closets

Do you stand where I stand with your hand in my hand, with your side by my side as I look on with eyes wide? Do you hear what I see and do you see what I hear because I’ve gone far too long without anyone else here and the silence that once taught me has now come to haunt me as my privatized cries fall on deaf ears. For I was under the illusion that if I hide my confusions that they’d all eventually go away, but if I disguise my face to hide my pain I’ll never obtain any spiritual aid and the tragedy of a story untold is that of a heart which alone grows cold beneath the secret skeleton’s chest - a rotting rib cage that dies yet never rests.

If only church closets could tell the stories of the souls that die inside them. Of those who feel the need to hide that which they believe defines them only to find that secrecy is that which truly confines them to suffocate in a shallow grave of claustrophobic head-space. For we all supposedly have skeletons in the closet, but what if we’re the ones who’ve decomposed inside and the bones are all that’s left to hide of what used to be our closed off minds?
Because the secrets we keep in church closets deep are of the most perilous kind - we lock ourselves away just so they can’t say whether or not we’re worth God’s time. We die in isolation to give you the gratification of the thought that we might be just like you.

Did you ever come to think that our stories might be important too? The stories that nobody wants to hear, the stories that everyone fears, the stories where we finally tell you about the giant pink elephant that’s always been standing here! Stories where the moral is that you’re basically wrong, that it’s finally time to change up your song, that our hiding is the lying that you’ve been living for so long.

And we know it’s not the whole story you’ve missed, but when our characters become complex it’s those chapters you skip because when the time bomb finally begins to tick it’s so much easier to just plead ignorant.

        So do you stand where I stand with your hand in my hand, with your side by my side as I tell our stories with eyes wide? Do you hear what I see and do you see what I hear because I no longer want to go on without anyone else here.