Jehovah. Heavenly Father.It is me again, and this is not an emergency.That is the first thing I want You to know.The last time I came runningthere was a mask coming down over my faceand a man counting backward from ten.This is only a Tuesday. I pray more now than I did then.Sometimes in words, sometimes in nothing,walking to the car, standing at the sink.Some prayers are quick, the way you check a lock.Some go on so long I forget I started.Nearly always alone. Except in a car, before a journey,when I take a woman's hand and say it out loud,keep us, bring us back,which is my father's prayer in my father's cadence,and I did not decide to inherit it.It arrived one day in my mouth. Now here is what I have not said to You plainly. I am not angry. I want that on the record.Whatever this is, it is not anger.It is quieter and it is worse.It is a man in a room asking a question,then listening, and hearing the room. Some days I am certain and I run to You like a boy.Some days I ask what You want from meand the silence has the shape of an answerand I cannot read it.I would like something literal.I know better than to ask for it.I am asking for it. And there is the other thing,the one I circle and do not land on. Four bags of a stranger's blood.My mother's God and my mother's sonin the same room, and only one of them saved.I said yes.I have never once said out loud what I fear about it. There are people in that faith who said no.Who lay in beds like mine and refused,and lived, and stood up afterward,and told it as evidence of You.I have read those testimonies.I know exactly what they mean. So which one was I.The one who trusted You,or the one who was afraid to die,who took the medicine and calls it providence.Was I saved by You or by a strangerwhose name is in no book I can open.And if it was the stranger,were You in the stranger,or is that only what a man sayswhen he needs both things to be true. I am afraid even setting this down.Not of You. Of the sentence.Of what it means that I can write it at all. And under all of it, the smaller question,the one I have asked before, in another room,of another father. Am I making You proud. That is what I actually came to ask.That is what I have been circlingfor four years and two hundred prayers. Not, did I do right.Not, am I forgiven. Am I one You are pleased with. The room does not answer.The room has never answered. I get up anyway. I go to work.I keep the vow the way a man keeps a househe is not certain anyone lives in. Tomorrow I will pray again.I will not ask this again.I will ask about the day, and the people,and safe travel, and my mother's health. And You will know what I did not ask.And if You are not there,then no one will,and it stays where it has stayed,under the ribs, on the left,next to the blood that is not mine. — tachi