On the distance

The church lay in ruins. Its roof had caved with the weight of seasons, and the wind that once carried bells now passed unhindered through the open vault. Its walls leaned like old men who had lost the strength to stand. Vines crawled through what had been the sacristy. The altar stone lay split in two, its fracture lined with dust. Zanates flew where incense once rose, cutting dark arcs through the roofless nave and nesting where the saints once stood.

The priest stood there, a man returned to the bones of his youth. He had grown up here, barefoot among the nopales, baptized at the same font where now scorpions nested. He had knelt here and watched candles gutter against the stone. He touched the wall, and the dust clung to his fingers. He pressed them to his lips, tasting earth, lime, ash. He walked across the nave where the tiles were broken, and weeds had grown between them.

A voice rose from the shadowed apse.
“You’ve come back.”

The priest turned. An old man sat on the broken step, bent and white-haired, his hands resting as if carved from the stone itself. His eyes caught the light faintly, pale, unhurried.

“This was my church,” the priest said, his voice tinged with nostalgia.

“It was never only yours. It was rock before it was raised, and it will be rock when the last name of it is forgotten,” said the old man.

The priest’s throat worked, but no words came.

“You see loss, but loss is only a name men give to the turning of things,” the old man said, shifting his wooden cane in his hands.

“And what about faith?” challenged the priest.

The old man looked at him with a calm that pressed like desert heat. “Faith is a season. You tend it and it blooms, and its people harvest its comfort, its songs. It was real while it was sung. Then it dries and the stalks rattle in the wind. Do you call the wind false because it scatters the husks?”

“Time moves,” he continued. “Nothing is hidden from it, but odes do not punish. You, I, the stones, the wind: these are witnesses, not executioners. And yet… even in the darkest hours, when there was nothing, something grew, somewhere.”

The priest lowered his gaze. He whispered, “But if all passes, what remains?”

“The turning itself. The stone becomes dust, the dust becomes soil, the soil feeds the root. Destruction is the other face of birth. You call it ruin, but I call it return,” replied the old man calmly.

“Do not mourn what ends. Even your grief will one day be gathered back. All is held in the big scheme of things; all is remembered.”

The priest’s throat tightened. “It does make me feel small.”

“Good. It is always right to feel the smallness. From it, you can see more, the stars, the mountains, the heat in your hands, the cool in the shade. You see what men call miracles, but it is only the passing of days, of seasons, of choice.”

The priest paused. “So… we are free.”

“Yes,” said the old man. “Free to stumble, to love, to fail, to rise. The wind does not ask; the river does not choose. And yet they carve valleys and bring rain. You, too, will leave your mark as they do.”

The priest felt the weight of years loosen; not with despair but with a strange calm, as if the ruins themselves enfolded him in their arms. His eyes searched for the old man. In the lines of his face, he saw not merely age but an order older than age itself, the weight of years uncounted. He thought of verses half-remembered, of time without end.

“Go on, father. Watch for a moment and wait. Your time is not gone; it has been given back,” the old man said with a smile. “And know that what ends is not lost.”

And in his voice the priest felt neither judgment nor mercy, but something vaster that held both a quiet that was not emptiness but fullness.

The priest sat on the stone, knees pressed to dust, and for a moment, when he closed his eyes, he was an altar boy again, heart quick, hands folded, listening for something that could not be spoken.

The zanates dipped and wheeled through the open rafters, their wings scattering light, and when the priest opened his eyes, he knew the church was not ruined but completed, its end no less sacred than its beginning.

The old man placed a hand on the priest’s shoulder light as a moth’s wing. “Remember, Father,” he said, “what ends is not lost.”

He nodded once, a gesture of farewell, and walked out through the nave, his cane echoing in the empty church. The priest listened to the sound until it faded into silence, and then there was only the wind and the birds, and the lingering scent of earth and candle wax.