i come to you not as a man but as a heresy that learned how to kneel.
my hands are still shaped like weapons, but i keep folding them anyway, as if prayer might file down the bones into something fit to touch you again.
nothing i do absolves the architecture of what i am.
i broke our house with my mouth first… not with infidelity, not with flesh, but with language sharpened into scripture.
i turned sentences into knives.
i baptized my anger and called it truth.
i watched them land in you and pretended i was not the one holding the blade.
that is the original sin.
i said the things you cannot unhear.
i carved them into you with my voice.
i gave you a theology of abandonment and asked you to live inside it.
when you left, i did not weep.
i became a chapel after the fire… walls still standing, saints still watching, but everything holy reduced to smoke and the smell of burned offerings.
so i laid myself on a stranger’s altar.
i let another body become a sacrament of forgetting.
i let their hands bless me only because they did not know my true name.
i let their mouth pronounce forgiveness they had no authority to give.
it was self-execution performed slowly so the soul could watch.
i wanted to feel filthy because filth was easier than grief.
i wanted to feel used because being wanted by a stranger was quieter than being chosen by you.
i did not betray you for pleasure.
i betrayed myself for silence.
and when you came back… when you stood there, still breathing, still willing to rebuild a cathedral on a foundation i had cracked with my own spine… i had to drag my sin into the light like a corpse and say: “this is what i became when i thought you were gone.”
confession is not cleansing.
i watched your trust die in your eyes.
it died like a saint starved in a sealed room… quiet, devout, and alone.
now i sleep beside you like a penitent, not a lover.
we lie parallel like unburied bodies.
our hands learn restraint as doctrine.
our skin memorizes distance like law.
your silence is not peace.
every breath i take beside you feels like standing trial before a god who still loves me and that is worse than condemnation.
because mercy requires transformation, and i am built out of things that do not change easily.
not because of what i did… but because part of me believes i deserve to be the one left behind.
i was not the softer brother.
i was not the easier prayer.
and sometimes… in the quiet, when i am most unguarded… i wonder if the universe made a clerical error and bound you to the wrong altar.
what if you were meant for gentler hands?
what if i was only meant to guard you, not claim you?
what if i mistook possession for providence and called it fate?
these thoughts are blasphemy.
but they kneel in me anyway.
because i know what i am capable of saying when wounded.
i know how holy language becomes lethal in my mouth.
i fear myself more than i fear losing you.
that is the part i do not say aloud.
i wear repentance like armor now.
i earn proximity like a prisoner earns air.
every small allowance from you feels like a relic passed through glass… close enough to worship, too sacred to touch.
not because i am forgiven.
but because i am willing to be unmade if it means you might one day look at me and not see the man who shattered the sanctuary.
i am not asking to be trusted.
i am asking to be rebuilt.
if love is a religion, then let me be its most punished priest.
if devotion is proven by endurance, then let me bleed quietly until you believe again.
i will sleep beside you like a guard at the tomb of what we were.
i will stand watch over my own ruin until you decide whether resurrection is permitted for men like me.
i am still yours in my bones.
i am still your sin in my blood.
for the right to be remade in the image of the man you deserved the first time.
and now i take up the pen again, and seal this confession the only way i know how: amen.
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
