I’ve lived my entire life in cities
where telling time without a clock is hard,
where the skies stay folded between sheets of steel and concrete,
where the first rains lose their fragrance
in civilised sewage,
and religion is routine, not ritual.
Where life has moved on from survival to flourish,
so people discuss the finer things — like equality,
because invention of philosophy is a luxury
granted only when life isn’t a bargain.
Faith is easier to lose
when lunch doesn’t cost more than the price on your flesh.
Every now and then I cross paths
with lives born of very different mathematics,
whose ticket into the city
cost them their father’s bones and mother’s flesh,
whose right to survive the city
was paid for with innocence.
They come from a land
where clocks, like culture, are inherited;
where skies stay wide and honest,
where the air smells of sweat and soil;
where life isn’t guaranteed
but earned at dawn each day.
Where softness is a rumour,
and cracked heels and coarse tongues
have no use for finer things.
Where faith is not routine or repetition
but the singular manuscript of survival.
Where clay silhouettes wrapped in religion
are the only moments
women become something more
than faint kitchen voices,
more than house-lizards
scuttling between duty and dread,
more than silent witnesses
to a man’s drunk tenderness.
For a handful of hours,
faith lets them borrow
the same skin and bone as men.
When faith is your only permitted escape,
atheism is an inevitable demise, long before death.
They often tell me, these people,
that,
faith has been misunderstood.
And I keep wondering
whether this is the birth
of a new faith —
one that no longer asks what you believe,
only what it costs you to believe it.
Or maybe, faith isn’t misunderstood.
Faith is exhausted.
It is the last muscle people move
when all other muscles have failed.
It is the only currency left
when the world has priced dignity out of reach.
And somewhere between city glass
and village dust,
between borrowed certainties
and inherited wounds,
we all learn the shared truth:
No one believes because they want to.
People believe because they must.
Because disbelief demands a freedom
their lives were never built to afford.
And maybe this,
this quiet, reluctant, necessary surrender,
is the truest kind of faith there ever was:
the faith that keeps us from collapsing
under the weight of realising
we were never choosing anything at all.
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