by Ruby Roselle Lorenzo Tugade

Addiction, as a confession, kills. Dependency is too clinical.

Habit, instead, squarely places a need against the foreground of the familiar.

Everyday pain is a creature that transforms. They say a pattern of chemical subservience is killing a country.

To live in prayer, the same must be true. One must be clothed

with the habit of faith. We wear our rituals and repetitions as extensions of ourselves.

The tap-tap-tap of my right foot. The urge to stare at a screen.

I live in these automatic movements.

Can I also wear my pleas like strung-up beads meant for devotion to

the one blessed among women, blessed is the fruit of her womb?

When will she arrive, who is to be the vessel of my own salvation?

I talked to her once in a dream: now is the time to find me.

Now, before the hour of my death.