Faded photos

They never tell the whole story do they. When the pain has eased and the memories are not quite as vivid and when the good moments somehow overshadow the bad ones, the faded photos remind you of what you left unspoken. The mind plays tricks on you, tries to convince you of your own frailty, tries to get you to ignore, to gloss over the truth. And those faded photos guilt you into agreeing with your mind. You gaslight yourself, convince yourself that it wasn't as bad as you thought, maybe it didn't really happen, maybe it was just your own darkness that took you over, maybe you weren't really pulled apart from limb to limb. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a lie you told yourself, all a lie that no one ever believed anyway. Maybe it really wasn't the way you remember it. Was it? 

Faith

Faith is not in your temples 

It's not in your mosques or churches

Faith has no place no house no dominion

None save the boundaries of your mind

Faith is not found in the following of tradition

Nor in the ritualistic consumption of evangelist propaganda 

It is not in the rules and books we read

Only in our own hearts

Faith has seen stronger hearts and deeper wounds

It has seen into the emptiness of your being

Faith has held you when you're at your weakest

And sometimes abandoned you in your blindness

Faith has brought hope and despair and love and hate, and all those complexities of human emotion

It does not ask, it does not command

It only wishes you be true to you

No, Faith has not given me a path

But only given me strength to choose my own

-Ritu Valluri Rao