Stable Destruction

Mercy cannot be framed as irresponsibility.

📄 ✂️ 🕳️

The ritual started because our devotion wasn't focused - we believed that we could love many at once.

We knew that love in this form was - questionable.

So we confessed - kept translating our romantic transgressions against each other week after week. Our souls attained a feathery lightness after each confession - or so we thought. 

It mattered that we were to write down every act of betrayal. The absolution of that was non-negotiable. With ultimate precision, we wrote down each whispered betrayal, each act of dishonesty.

The ritual didn't concur with logical reasoning. Trust should have denied his presence. Marriage should have become paper for burning. 

The ritual didn't concur with logical reasoning. Trust should have denied his presence. Marriage should have become paper for burning. 

Each backhanded alliance.

Each note was absolved - forgiveness was a forgone conclusion, a must. 

Our souls felt lighter than before the ritual, nearly weightless. And the notes kept piling - Everest was ashamed.

More than we ever were.

We adhered to the ritual, day after day, month after month.

Year after year.  

It never hurt while it happened. 

The marriage lingered, open. 

We jotted down confessions on arbitrary pieces of paper and ripped them apart, without a second thought. 

Maintaining alliances - some straightforward, most not. Absolution, with the ripping of each note, eased each one.

Eased our souls. They became feathery light. 

But as the weight of Transgression left us, the toll of others stayed. 

Dismissal. Disvalue.   

Disfavor. 

The ritual had been performed many times before, in different ways. 

Confessions just as soul-lightening, and unhinging.

Apologies that came too quickly, soothed for too short a time, and released without meaning or payment.

Children who bore the weight of meaningless absolution - sightless and unheard. Familial relationships formed without familiarity.

Alliances borne out of necessity and distrust.

Recorded, almost too meticulously, in journals, photos and damning letters, decades earlier.

Love had absolved souls that lightened. But stayed.

They each recognised their handwriting, formed at earlier times. Devotion had predecessors, malformed.

It was not our ritual to perform. But confessions without meaning were made.

And souls floated. No anchor.

Drifting ceaselessly, eternally, without respite or affirmation. 

Time healed wounds, with their sting continuing to smart and pierce.

The ritual continued. The confessions were stark reminders, laid in black and white, in journals.

Consuming the souls of those who truly loved, attentively and sincerely. 

The confessions preserved the relationship - one that remained, in different parts, scattered, yet together. 

There was no resistance towards it - it continued, preserving souls with festering wounds.

Knowing resolved - making incomplete, irresolute forms. 

They were unclear- the ritual was the only responsibility.

Love did not release. It perpetuated.

A neglected child.

The ritual - and the abject, yet trite confessions - continued. Both partners stayed. Souls obedient, but fractured. 

Damaged - yet stable. 

The confessions did what they had to do - leaving stable destruction in their wake. 

What we have doesn't need us whole - it needs us there. 

We survived the absence and the harsh truths, with the cost of nothing following. 

The ritual of shallow confession is pending - our son has married.

The young lady - undamaged, naive, unprotected. 

Our elder daughter, too, has married, knowing full well the ritual and its truths.

The young man - equally innocent, faithful, and steady.

Unguarded.

Unaware of the costs of love, the ritual, and its power.

May they never need one. 

May they never require truths without notice, recognition, or power. 

May they never need confessions without spirit.

May they never need confessions at all. 

But the ritual waits -silent. 

Sentient, ready to hold. 

📄 ✂️ 🕳️

Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

For Vocal's Rituals of Affection Challenge