Chapter Text
Gold was never warmth. It was the color of my judgment. It was the trim on the high altar where they made me kneel until my knees bruised, the oppressive sheen of haloed saints staring down with unblinking eyes, and the burning sunlight that exposed every flaw I was taught to hate about myself. Gold meant the standard, purity, and the divine weight I could never carry.
Green was never life. It was the color of my penance. It was the heavy glass beads of the rosary my mother forced into my once small hands, its surface slick with my own sweat as I dragged my thumbs over each decade. Green was the tone of my forced silence, of endless Ave Marias recited to cleanse sins I hadn't even learned how to commit, a weight wrapping around my wrists like a vine choking out air as I plead to the father that never heard my cries. A father that only demanded sacrifice.
From afar, I looked at you and only saw more light to fear. I thought you were another sun sent to scorch me, but your eyes were carrying a brightness so vivid it felt like a warning than a danger. Your smile is as radiant as a summer that would burn my fragile world to ash. And yet I braced myself for the warmth of the brightest star, expecting it to consume me.
Up close, your softness proved every holy text wrong. You were not the manicured gardens of the parish, but untamed nature. Like the wild grass that cradles me when I finally surrender to the earth. Like the fallen leaves clinging softly to my skin, expecting nothing in return.
Where the altar demanded my silence, you simply gave me breath.
I was raised in the shadows of golden cages built from false light and forced devotion. Taught that the sky existed only to watch for my failures, and the earth was nothing more than a stone floor upon which to beg for mercy until my knees ached and bled for a god that was no longer alive.
I learned to bury my true voice behind cold masonry and hollow, rhythmic prayers, holding that green rosary so tight until the sharp wire bit into my palms like the horns that I bear.
I believed that love was a ledger of debt, and that beauty was just another trap meant to keep me quiet.
I believed in him.
Then you crashed into my quiet timberland, a wild, fierce presence with smudged charcoal on your fingers and mud on your boots, unbowed by the men who tried to break us, and untamed by the walls built to keep us apart. You did not ask me to pray. You did not ask me to apologize. You did not ask me to plead. You simply reached into the dark, took my bruised hands, and placed marigolds as delicate as us.
You gave me room to exist when the holy air was suffocating. You took the dark heavy woods of my isolation and used them to build our sanctuary. Our home. In a world made of silver blades, golden judgments, and unyielding rules, you stripped them—everything—away and built a shelter for us so we can live just for a moment.
You took the green from my scarred hands and gave me back the forest. You made it into the moss under our feet as we ran through the woods laughing like we had all the time in our greedy hands.
You shielded me from the scorching fire that was my sins and gave me the entire sun. You made it into the sunlight which you would catch with your fingers knowing it slip through them.
You were never the light that judged me, nor the growth that demanded me to plead, for you were my sanctuary, my anchor, and my home.
My breath, my savior, my lord.
And I am merely your devotee.