Presence

Someone once called me a crazy one, so I thought I’d write a strange little story —

1. Silence

Dark, cold — an endless night with no hint of an end.

I kept waiting, wondering how long it would last.

No matter how many times I spoke to you, you never answered.

Why do you ignore me?

Have you stopped listening to me?

Or were you never there at all?

I needed you so badly that your absence became almost a presence of its own.

The sheer fact that you were nowhere was like an invisible knife lodged inside me — one I had no idea how to remove.

It hurt unbearably, and yet I couldn’t even tell where the pain came from.

Years passed — ten, maybe more — and your silence, once unbearable, has softened into something I live with.

I’ve learned to live quietly while knowing you’re gone.

Even without you, I still keep speaking.

I still love, and give thanks.

Haha right. To whom? For what?

It doesn’t matter. No one cares. It’s just my little ritual.

Sometimes the nights of solitude return, but the ache is no longer sharp. 

I can touch it now, taste it, and quietly say, so be it.

2. Pulse

When I was a child, you were always on my side.

You were in the light that streamed through the window,

in the wind carrying the scent of summer,

in every small act of unexpected kindness.

When everyone else had gone to sleep and I whispered into the dark, you were always there.

The cookies the sisters baked were my absolute favourite — better than anything I’d ever had.

I loved singing hymns beside the older girls, lighting candles carved with holy care, placing flowers before the cross.

I remember how we gathered things for the church bazaar — I’d run around collecting old toys, hand-knit scarves, books no one read anymore.

And on Sundays after mass, we sold coffee and homemade cookies to support the recovery efforts after the 2011 earthquake in eastern Japan.

It was my hometown — one of the affected areas.

Outside that little chapel, though, no one ever spoke your name.

Which, honestly, made sense — it was just a typical Asian city after all, that saw you as a foreigner. The school I went was just an ordinal local public school.

Some of my friends even laughed.

So I never told my closest friends about you.

And slowly, what you said and what teachers said no longer seemed matched.

By the time I entered university, the world was full of new light and possibility.

One day, I heard that no children went to that chapel anymore,

and I realized I hadn’t been back in years.

At university I fell in love with physics — I mean, along with several other things — and the scientist in me grew too strong.

I no longer felt your presence.

3. Grace

Still, after all these years, and after all my different eras, I chose not to stop praying.

My prayer is no longer a call to some absolute or personal being.

It’s more like a quiet courtesy toward existence itself —a small ritual that keeps me connected to the rhythm of nature and the world

and to the invisible trust that holds everything together.

I don’t try to prove anything anymore.

But even on days when I can’t feel hope, I still perform the gesture of hope — watering a flower, listening, feeling the wind on my skin, celebrating someone, caring for someone, offering love in small, quiet ways.

Because I’ve decided to love humanity, to love the world — with all its flaws and contradictions.

Because I believe, or maybe I simply choose to believe, that existence by itself is worthy of affection and affirmation.

That act of hope — this small, repeated act — is my prayer.

It is, in its own way, my faith.

I just can’t trust the kind of love that exists only under a sacred name, that fades the moment it’s not returned; nor the hearts that dismiss kindness, connection, or goodwill simply because they don’t fit the rules —as if compassion from outside their circle were something foreign, even wrong.

And I can’t trust any holiness that uses the name of heaven to hurt or to deny another.

After all, what exists between a person and Him is entirely personal — something no one else can own.

I want to become someone who stays beside those who suffer, who doesn’t abandon, who keeps loving — quietly, deeply.

Even if you no longer see me, or even if you were never there, I’ll keep praying.

I’ll keep trusting the world, trusting the breath of nature, appreciating being here, accepting what is beyond my control — even when I’m lost, even when I’m alone.

This act of hope, this act of love, this courtesy toward existence — I want to keep practicing it.

Creating, too, is part of that practice — a ritual of gratitude and presence.

Your silence no longer accuses me.

It has become a quiet space through which I keep looking at the world, steadily, with my own eyes.

Even on the hard days, I know I shouldn’t stop — because that, too, is part of learning how to live.

And strangely enough, though life keeps unfolding in its unpredictable ways, I’m at peace now — perhaps more than ever.

I’m finally learning something about gentleness, and something about strength.

Maybe that’s all faith ever was.