Mercy was never the language I trusted

I don’t pray.

Not because I’ve never wanted to. There have been nights when the black stayed so long I’d look upward out of sheer exhaustion. I know what it is to lie in the dark and want relief badly enough to call it faith.

I just don’t do it.

The devil doesn’t get the blame. God doesn’t get the credit.

That’s too easy. Too much like handing my ledger to somebody else. If I wrecked something, I wrecked it. If I endured something, I endured it. If I survived, it was because morning came and I stepped out into it.

I’ve dressed uglier things in better names before. Called stubbornness honor. Called pride discipline. Called rage clarity. I know how a man can polish his own ruin until it almost looks like principle.

Life gets heavy, and there is still the next hour.

“The only easy day is yesterday” is a cliché, but it survives for a reason. Yesterday is easy because it can’t ask another thing of you. Today is the one with teeth. Today still wants restraint, labor, one more decision, one more hour of keeping your hands off what won’t be returned.

So no, I don’t pray.

I don’t ask for a lighter load. I don’t ask for a sign. I don’t ask the sky to explain itself as if I’m owed an answer. Mercy was never the language I trusted, and I damn sure won’t beg for it.

That isn’t bravery. Some of it is pride. Some of it is spite. Some of it is the old refusal to let pain watch me crawl.

I understand the appeal of prayer. I understand wanting witness. Wanting someone to keep count. Wanting to believe the loneliness is supervised and the losses are noted. I’ve felt the pull of that. More than once.

I’ve wanted things I knew better than to trust.

What I have instead is the dark kitchen, my hands braced against the counter, the window black over the sink, and the long quiet work of carrying what’s mine until morning.

There are still a few things I’d call sacred. A promise kept in private. Showing up when it would be easier not to. Restraint when all you want to do is strike back. Refusing to stain what was once beautiful with how it ended.

If that’s prayer, it isn’t the kind with folded hands.

It’s the kind that stays in the room.

Not because I feel nothing holy. Not because I’ve never wanted some vast and fatherly thing to come down out of the dark and tell me I had suffered enough.

I have wanted that.

I just don’t build a life on wanting.

So I keep quiet. I carry what I can. I answer for my own soul.