Stillness Under Painted Ceilings

We were sunburnt and half-delirious from the rooftop of a forgotten warehouse when we spotted it.
A gothic spire in the distance.
Boarded windows.
A silhouette of faith abandoned.

Curiosity took the wheel.
And like moths to dying light, we made our way across crumbled streets and broken fences.
What we found wasn't just a church.
It was a cathedral of ghosts.

The pews were long gone. The altar – half rubble.
Water seeped through every crack, feeding rot and rust.
Yet somehow… the silence echoed louder than any choir ever could.

The ceiling — hand-painted, ornate, defiant.
The stained glass — fractured but proud.
And in the shadows of it all:
An organ.

Massive.
Silent.
Its ivory keys warped by time, its voice now locked behind dust and vandal’s hands.
Some of the stops had been torn out. Others dangled loosely like pulled teeth.

We flipped through hymn sheets that hadn’t been touched in decades.
Ashes of music.
Memory in four-part harmony.

This place won’t survive another winter.
You can feel it in the walls. In the mold. In the heartbreak of every fading detail.

We didn’t come to save it.
We came to remember.

To archive the absence.
To mark what time is eras