No formula

There were a lot of small endings, but the one I remember is a sermon. The preacher was on the bit about the speck in your brother's eye and the plank in your own. And somewhere in the middle of it I understood he was describing me. Not the person I was judging. Me, doing the judging. I'd become the thing the sermon was against, and I was sitting in the church feeling righteous about it.

By then the church was most of my social life. My close friends were from there. My week was built around it, I helped organise things, gave the time freely, and for a long time it didn't feel like giving anything, because it wasn't labour, it was something that I loved.

The cost came when I started to leave. You don't lose a belief, you lose a world. The friends were church friends. The females at church who used to call and keep me company, that was a whole warmth I had, they're still in my life in one specific way: they call to pray for me. They look at me like I'm damned and lost. The love didn't stop. It just changed shape into something that grieves for my soul.

And here's what I'm not certain about. I don't know if I kept the rules all those years because I believed them or because everyone I loved was inside the rules with me. I can't run the experiment. By the time I started asking the questions I was already halfway out the door, and the answer would've needed me to ask it while you still inside.

What nobody warns you about is how much work the leaving makes. Inside the church, there were formulas. A way to structure the week. A way to pray. A way to date or not date, that someone had already worked out for you. Even the books were chosen; the church handed you a reading list and a few preachers it was safe to like. I outsourced your filtering and called it faith.

Now I filter everything myself. What to read. How to spend a Sunday. What I actually think about anyone. It's freedom, and freedom turns out to be mostly admin. Nobody told me the open field would feel this much like standing in a field.