The Quiet Apostasy

The Quiet Apostasy

They told me there would be light.
Just not this kind.
Not this scraping, fluorescent, never dimming kind of light
that peels you open
and leaves you standing there
naked
with nowhere to put your hands.
They said heaven would feel
like being held.
But nothing here touches you.
Not the air.
Not the ground.
Not the people who stand beside you
like rows of mannequins waiting for a command
that never comes.
And the clouds
God,
the clouds,
They aren’t soft.
They aren’t gold rimmed or holy or anything you’d paint on a ceiling.
They stack.
Gray.
Flat.
Heavy as old hospital sheets
that have been washed too many times
and still don’t come clean.
I remember praying as a kid
folding my hands like I was taught,
believing something was listening.
Believing
if I just said it right
meant it hard enough
someone, something,
would answer.
I used to picture this place.
Soft light.
Warm voices.
A hand on my shoulder
Saying
you made it.
But there is no voice here.
Just light.
That awful, steady light
that shows you everything
you thought had been forgiven.
Every word you swallowed.
Every moment you stepped back
when you should have stepped forward.
Every time you told yourself
it didn’t matter.
It’s all here.
Laid out.
Not judged.
Not punished.
Just…
There.
And the worst part?
No one cares.
No one turns.
No one says your name
like it’s part of something.
I tried to pray.
God, I tried.
I stood in that endless glare
and I said the words I used to say
when I still believed they went somewhere.
And they just,
fell.
Like they hit a wall I couldn’t see
and slid down
out of reach.
Nothing echoed.
Nothing answered.
And that’s when it hit me.
Faith was never about certainty.
It was about reaching.
It was about the hope
that something would reach back.
But here,
there is no reaching.
No need.
No hunger.
No reason for anything
to move toward anything else.
This place doesn’t want you.
It doesn’t reject you either.
It just,
doesn’t need you.
And that silence
that absence
that clean, perfect, untouched stillness,
that’s the part the brochure left out.
That’s the part they hid
behind harps
and wings
and smiling paintings of light.
Because heaven,
real heaven,
is a place so complete
it has no use
for you at all.
And I stand here
in all this endless, shining nothing
Realizing
the world didn’t end
when I died.
It ended
when I stopped
being needed.

By Heather Patton / Verdant Butterfly

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©2026 Heather Patton · The Verdant Butterfly

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