The Odds

When the odds add up against you. I know this hymn. I sang it as a child, praising through the fire, praising through the hunger, praising while the world stacked its weight on my mother's back, on my father's silence. Are they trying to claim you? You could be the offering. The latest thing to have touched the light and lived to tell or lived to fall. The light hovers at the edge of everything I need. So close that all I need to do is reach. Some laws are older than hunger. Some distances exist because the divine and the desperate are not allowed to hold each other. And below me. The odds. Empty souls who once knew warmth and spend eternity remembering it. They reach for me not to destroy, but because I still smell like the light I left. I am the last ember they want to cup against their darkness. They pull at me with their grief, their depression without malice, but with need so vast it becomes gravity. Faded hope falls past me. Tribute from the world above, beauty shedding itself into the dark. I watch them drift and understand the despair is not just down here. The oblivion reaches upward too, fading the edges of everything I thought was permanent. Maybe I should let them have me. There could be some peace in being held, even by darkness and by need. And maybe I will become one more hand in the void, craving what I almost had. Or maybe the hand above will finally close the gap. Maybe I am the bridge. Maybe the odds add up not to bury me but to lift me, all these hands becoming a platform, a foundation of prayer made of fingers. Or it could be when the odds add up against you, praise does not change them. Light does not guarantee rescue. And the darkness is patient, endlessly patient, filled with others who once believed they were specially different, chosen to be pulled from the void, until they realized they were always meant to be the bridge someone else would use to try to climb. Mizuyōkaii, 2026 Dimensions: 4576x5680