A Religion of Ordinary Things

By Nidhi

Bow your head if you must, but not in shame.

We make a kind of prayer of our wanting:

I petition the small holy things: your mouth when it is angry,

the child-sized fears you hide in shoes, the mole you call a fault.

Teach me to adore the drawers of you no one opens.

This is different from myth.

No trumpet calls at the moment of dying; no altar where grief stands in for faith.

I want a sanctity that lives on kitchen counters,

that knows the exact angle of your bent thumb,

and the names you have for your failures.

Love like this will not flatten you into a statue.

It will learn your worst verbs and bless them anyway:

the jealousies that smell of old hunger, the clumsy lies told to spare someone’s eyes.

I will not polish them away. I will catalogue them, memorize their shape,

kiss them as one kisses the wound that taught the bone to hold.

We have learned to worship lovers who prove themselves by ruin.

Achilles gave the world a grief so pure it could be carved;

Romeo and Juliet taught teenagers how to make catastrophe beautiful;

Krishna and Radha taught longing how to become scripture.

But I will not make our faith of funeral pyres.

I ask for a covenant more radical: reciprocity in the small transactions of being alive.

If you offer me your ugly parts, I will not bargain.

If you hand me your shame, I will not trade it for gentler days.

I will take it into my mouth and learn the taste of it

not to swallow it, not to spit it back, but to name it aloud so it has no power to surprise us later.

There will be nights I am a house on fire:

the hollow at my ribs a room with the wind always in it.

There will be mornings you wake with a map of my faults on your lips.

We will sit across from each other with tea and the ruined poems of our pasts,

and still, the work will be to return-again and again-toward the same fragile altar.

I want a love that says, plainly: I choose you now, tomorrow, and for all the mistakes you are going to

make.

I do not want the proof to be martyrdom. I do not want the proof to be perfection.

I want it to be the patient arithmetic of two people giving and taking, failing and returning,

the kind of counting that makes the ledger of a lifetime.

This is my vow, whispered in the language of wood and worn coins:

if you show me the ugliest thing you hold, I will give it a name and then a kiss.

If you show me the most private shame, I will house it, clean it, make it small enough to sleep beside.

If you hand me your wanting, I will not be afraid-I will be a place where it is received.

And when the world asks for proof, we will not offer death as testimony.

We will show the small miracles: the days we stayed, the apologies we learned, the mouths that stopped

rehearsing and began to speak the truth.

Let others make their epics of sorrow. I ask for a quieter sacrament,

the sort of holiness that rubs shoulders with laundry and tenderness,

that has patience enough to learn your worst word and still find its music.

If this is blasphemy to the old stories, let the old stories stand.

I prefer a belief that is messy and mutual, fierce and forgiving.

I want the kind of love that makes the ordinary feel like liturgy,

and the liturgy feel like home.

So come, bring your faults like light.

I will stand in that light and make a promise as old as hunger and as new as morning:

to want you, wholly, not little by little but with a gravity that holds.

To give back the exact thing you need without losing my own edges.

To love you not as a shrine but as a companion, wound in hand, offering it to you,

and seeing in your eyes, at last, the same astonished offering.

And if one line must be the blade, let it be clear and final-

I will learn to love your darkness so well the world believes it is day.

By Nidhi