Chance or Design

Same numbers as the prayer. Read them again at four. The light off. The house asleep. Just you and the arithmetic. Run the odds the way you ran them in the bright. Fraction of a fraction, then divide that twice tonight. The same sum that felt like a halo on the stage reads at this hour like a debt with no due date, no age. You cannot feel the floor. The room will not stay still. You keep checking that your hands are yours, and they will not. It does not read as real. It reads as a rendered thing, a life too smooth to have happened, a set behind the skin. In the daylight it was proof that you were meant. At four it is the bill, and you cannot tell who sent it. Chosen, then, by something. Chosen, then, for what. The gift sits on the table and it asks you to be enough. Somewhere a kid with all your wiring spawned to nothing at all, same hands, same hunger, no ticket, and you did nothing to draw yours. You did nothing. Say it once. The word will not get warm. And now the maths comes round on you: if there's a plan, you owe the plan. Owe it a reason. Owe it a return. Justify the seat or the whole improbable thing was wasted, and you were the waste. The longer you hold the number the colder the number gets, and the awe you wore in the daylight turns to something you can't set down. If chance, you owe the ones it skipped. If chosen, you owe the one who chose. There is no version of the sum where the answer comes back nothing owed. Design or chance. Design or chance. You owe it either way. You owe it either way. So you sit with the figure you will never say aloud, and the figure does not move, and the night does not move, and the debt that has no number is the only thing that's real. Same odds as the hymn. Read cold. You owe.