[Requiem] The first step

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My footsteps echo on the tiles; the acoustics here are… haunting. The thing looming in front of me, I cannot bear to look at.

...Why am I here?

Confrontation. First this, then him. Following steps long overdue. My feet were smaller the last time I trod here. Reluctant then as now, but I wore white shoes that day. Never again.

The air is cold, a lingering scent of pungent incense hanging in the air, and deathly, deathly silent. The romantic in me would like to think it has been this way the past eighteen years. Part of me died here, after all. But romance has no place in this story.

The steps up to the chancel might be more than I can manage.

Hardly anything has changed: the wood grain of the lectern, the lustrous crimson of the runner, the discoloured pane of glass in one of the clerestory windows, the dark claret cloth binding of the books, though perhaps a little more worn now. As I look down, my eyes catch splashes of dull white wax on the bottom step.

Something in me breaks.

A droplet of red shatters over them too quick for me to stop, and I raise a hand to brush my cheek as I fill with shame. I can almost feel the cold, rough stone pressing against my jaw, the heavy heat against the backs of my legs. My fingertips graze my abdomen, feeling the spoiled skin of the scar.

Resenting that this place should take so much as a tear from me now, I lower myself tremblingly to one knee and rub away the stain, leaving a waxy residue on my skin that is all too familiar.

How many times have these steps been scrubbed since then?

No amount of scrubbing will make this place pure again.

It takes a great deal of courage to raise my eyes; somehow this feels like one of the hardest things I have had to do since wielding that scalpel over a decade ago, the bright glittering burst of fireworks above me glinting off the blade; but raise my eyes I do. And there he is, perfect in his suffering, perfect in his lie.

I remember thinking, did you die for this sin?