SHAY Prequel: When Heaven Was Quiet

SHAY Prequel: When Heaven Was Quiet, I Asked Heaven To Correct Me.

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

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CHAPTER ONE

The Good Girl

I used to believe goodness was something other people could hear in you.

Not see.

Not prove.

Hear.

In the softness of your answer. In the pause before your anger. In the way you lowered your voice when someone else began to cry. I believed if I became gentle enough, careful enough, clean enough inside, then no one would ever have to wonder what I was.

They would know.

They would say, That is a good girl.

And God would agree.

When I was fifteen, I rewrote simple messages seven or eight times before sending them.

Are you okay? felt too small.

I’m here if you need me felt too dramatic.

I love you felt dangerous, because what if I didn’t love correctly? What if I only loved being needed? What if love counted differently in heaven than it did on earth?

So I would erase everything and write:

No pressure. Just thinking of you.

Then I would stare at it until the words stopped looking kind.

That was the trouble with words. If I looked at them too long, they opened.

A sentence could have a second sentence hiding inside it. A kindness could have vanity under it. A prayer could have selfishness folded in the middle.

I did not trust myself.

People thought that meant I was humble.

At church, older women touched my shoulder and said I had a tender spirit. They said it like a blessing. Like tenderness was a lamp God had placed inside me.

They did not know the lamp was burning the house down.

Every Sunday, I sat in the third pew from the front with my knees pressed together and my Bible open in my lap. The pages were thin enough to tremble when the air-conditioning moved through the sanctuary. I liked that. It made scripture seem alive.

The pastor said God spoke to those who listened.

So I listened.

I listened until listening became a wound.

I listened for conviction in my thoughts, for warning in my dreams, for punishment in ordinary silence. I listened when my mother sighed in the kitchen. I listened when my father closed a cabinet too hard. I listened when someone laughed behind me at school and my body decided, before my mind could object, that I had done something wrong.

At night, I prayed for forgiveness for things I had not done yet.

That was my secret.

Not the terrible things.

The almost things.

The half-born thoughts that appeared and vanished before I could stop them.

A cruel sentence.

A jealous feeling.

A sudden image of someone crying because of me.

I would sit up in bed, heart hammering, and whisper, “I didn’t mean it.”

To God.

To the ceiling.

To whatever part of myself had produced the thought.

“I didn’t mean it. Please know I didn’t mean it.”

Sometimes I pressed my palms together so hard my fingers hurt.

Pain helped. Pain made intention feel visible.

By sixteen, I had learned to apologize before anyone accused me.

Sorry if that sounded wrong.

Sorry if I seemed distant.

Sorry if I made it about me.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

The word became a little room I could hide inside.

No one sees a girl clearly when she is always apologizing. They only see the apology. They only see the sweetness. They think sweetness is proof there is nothing underneath.

There was something underneath.

Not evil.

Not yet.

Only hunger.

A quiet hunger to be chosen without having to perform.

A hunger to be loved so completely that doubt would finally stop.

I did not know that was what I wanted.

I called it faith.

I called it purity.

I called it wanting to be good.

But sometimes, when I watched other girls laugh without checking the room first, I felt something in me go still.

They moved through the world like forgiveness had already happened.

I envied them so deeply it frightened me.

Then I would pray about the envy.

Then I would pray about the pride of noticing the envy.

Then I would pray about the exhaustion I felt while praying.

I was a girl made of mirrors facing mirrors.

Everything reflected until nothing could rest.

The first time a therapist told me I sounded “disarming,” I smiled because I thought she meant gentle.

She leaned forward in her chair, pen resting across her notebook.

“You know how to make people comfortable,” she said.

I nodded.

I wanted to be praised for it.

Then I hated myself for wanting praise.

“I just don’t want anyone to feel bad,” I told her.

That was true.

Mostly.

The room smelled like peppermint tea and carpet cleaner. There was a painting of a gray beach above her desk, the kind of painting offices use when they want sadness to look professional.

“Do you feel responsible for how everyone feels?” she asked.

I looked down at my hands.

My nails were bitten too short.

“I don’t know,” I said.

But I did know.

Responsibility was the closest thing I had to identity.

If someone was upset, I searched myself for the cause. If someone was quiet, I became quieter. If someone loved me, I became whatever version of myself seemed easiest to love.

That was how I survived.

That was how I entered softly.

A smile.

A tilted head.

A voice made warm on purpose.

People relaxed when I sounded calm, so I stayed calm.

I learned what someone needed before deciding whether I could give it. I learned that closeness grew best when it believed it was natural. I learned that if someone doubted me, I could slow down, soften, and wait for them to apologize for frightening me.

I did not think of this as manipulation.

I thought of it as being careful.

There is a difference when you are young.

Or maybe there isn’t.

At church, they asked me to read scripture during youth service because my voice was steady. Girls my age whispered that it was pretty. Boys looked at me with that startled expression boys get when they discover softness and mistake it for permission.

I stood at the lectern with the microphone too close to my mouth and read:

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits…”

My voice carried through the sanctuary like something poured.

Afterward, the pastor’s wife hugged me and said, “When you read, Shay, it feels like you believe every word.”

I smiled into her shoulder.

I did believe every word.

That was the problem.

I believed words could save me.

I believed they could condemn me.

I believed a sentence written thousands of years before I was born could still turn its face toward me in the dark and say, You.

That night, I lay awake and tested my thoughts.

Was that God?

Was that fear?

Was that me?

I did not know.

I was already living inside the question.

I just did not know the question would someday learn my name.

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CHAPTER TWO

Him

Before I tell you what happened later, I should tell you about the boy.

Not because he explains me.

No person should have to carry that much blame.

But because before him, love was something I studied from a distance. Something sung about in church, whispered about in bathrooms, acted out beneath stage lights.

After him, love became a room I could not leave.

We grew up near an old community theatre with peeling gold trim and red curtains that had faded into the color of dried roses. Adults said the place had ghosts. I believed them because every empty theatre feels occupied by something waiting to become visible.

He belonged there.

That is the only way I can explain it.

Some people act because they enjoy being watched. He acted like he had discovered a secret passage out of himself.

Onstage, he could become grief without being broken by it. He could become rage without frightening anyone. He could love someone under blue light, die under yellow light, rise again when the director called reset.

I watched him from the wings and thought:

How can he hold so many lives without losing his own?

He caught me staring once.

I expected him to laugh.

Instead, he smiled like he understood the question.

That was the beginning of my trouble with him.

He never opened fully. Not then. Not later. He was kind, but not available. Warm, but not surrendered. He had a way of making you feel seen without letting you see him back.

To someone else, that might have been frustrating.

To me, it became sacred.

A closed door is only a door to people who know how to leave.

To me, it was a calling.

Years passed. We became older in the careless way people do, without noticing each day being removed from them.

Then I saw him again during college auditions.

He recognized me instantly.

There was surprise first. Then warmth. Then something I still cannot name because naming makes it too real, too tender, too easy to lose.

He asked the director if we could be paired for the reading.

I pretended not to care.

Inside me, something fragile stood up.

The scene was simple. Two people in a kitchen, saying everything except the truth. He took me into the sound booth before we read, where dust floated in the light like tiny stars.

“You’re thinking too much,” he said.

“I always think too much.”

“I know.”

The words were gentle.

That made them worse.

He stepped closer, not too close, just close enough for me to notice I had a body.

“You don’t have to perform emotion,” he said. “Just let the character borrow what’s already there.”

“What if there’s too much there?”

He looked at me then.

Really looked.

“Then use only what you need.”

No one had ever said that to me before.

Use only what you need.

As if feeling did not have to consume the whole room.

As if I could choose.

As if there was a door inside intensity and he knew where the handle was.

We read together.

For three minutes, I was not Shay.

Or maybe I was finally Shay without the terror of being her.

Afterward, he whispered, “I think you could be anyone.”

He meant it as praise.

I received it as prophecy.

That night, we started writing to each other.

Long emails. Late messages. Conversations that stretched past midnight until language became softer from exhaustion.

We talked about theatre, God, dreams, whether people are born with one true self or spend their lives auditioning for whoever loves them best.

He said he believed people were complicated but not unknowable.

I wanted to believe him.

I wanted him to prove it.

One night I told him I wanted ice cream.

It was a stupid thing. A small thing. A sentence thrown into the dark because I wanted to see if the dark would answer.

He wrote back:

Give me fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, he stood outside my house beneath a streetlamp with an ice cream bar melting in his hand.

I still remember the shape of that light.

Yellow. Weak. Ordinary.

But I was young, and ordinary kindness felt like evidence of heaven.

We sat on the porch steps under the stars.

He laughed when the ice cream dripped over his fingers.

I laughed too, but carefully, because I was afraid joy might spill out of me in a way he could not love.

He looked at me and said, “You’re beautiful, Shay.”

My heart did something humiliating.

It believed him.

Not because no one had said it before.

People had said beautiful things to me before.

They said my voice was soothing. My smile was sweet. My spirit was tender. My mind was sharp. My heart was rare.

But when he said it, I felt seen by someone who knew how masks worked.

That made it dangerous.

That made it feel true.

For a while, I became better.

That is the part no one understands.

Love did not make me worse at first.

It quieted me.

I prayed less frantically. I slept longer. I stopped rewriting every message so many times. I let small mistakes remain in sentences. I let him see me tired. I let him see me unsure.

He did not punish me for it.

So I began to think maybe goodness was not something I had to constantly prove.

Maybe I could be loved while unfinished.

That hope was the cruelest thing I ever allowed myself.

Because he never stepped all the way in.

Not the way I did.

Not the way I needed.

There were rooms in him I could not enter. Names he did not explain. Silences he kept with both hands. Sometimes, while he spoke, I felt him leaving before he had gone anywhere.

I would watch his face and search for the hidden sentence beneath the sentence.

Did he love me?

Did he pity me?

Did he know what I was?

Could he feel how much of me was already arranged around him?

Once, he said, half laughing, “You look at me like I’m going to disappear.”

I almost told him the truth.

That everything disappeared unless I held it correctly.

That love had to be watched.

That if I blinked, he might become someone else’s answered prayer.

Instead, I smiled.

Softly.

Disarmingly.

The way people liked.

And said, “Maybe I just like looking at you.”

He believed me.

Or pretended to.

Later, he did marry someone else.

That belongs to another chapter of pain.

Another chapel.

Another kind of silence.

But before that, there was a smaller heartbreak, almost too quiet to name.

I realized he had taught me how to become anyone.

And then he chose someone who did not have to become.

That was when something in me began to harden.

Not all at once.

Nothing important breaks loudly.

It happened in private.

In the pause before answering a message.

In the smile I held half a second too long.

In the realization that if I could become what someone wanted, then I could also become what someone feared losing.

I did not want to hurt anyone.

I wanted to be impossible to leave.

At the time, I thought that was love.

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CHAPTER THREE

Before the Voice

I should confess something before the story becomes what you think it is.

People believe monsters announce themselves.

They imagine a growl. A warning. A shadow shaped wrong against the wall.

But most ruin enters softly.

It smiles.

It asks if you got home safe.

It remembers how you take your coffee.

It speaks in a voice warm enough to make suspicion feel unkind.

That was how I survived before I knew survival could become cruelty.

I did not enter rooms loudly. I entered gently. I let my face soften. I tilted my head. I made my voice low and careful, like honey poured over candlelight.

People trusted that voice.

Men especially.

They heard innocence in it. They heard invitation. They heard whatever hunger had already taught them to hear.

My therapist once called it disarming.

She did not know how correct she was.

Because there was a part of me that loved being adored.

I hate writing that.

Even now.

Even after everything.

But confession means opening the door before you have cleaned the room.

I loved the exact moment someone’s attention changed shape around me.

The widened eyes.

The softer tone.

The dangerous gentleness of being wanted.

Not in a simple way. Not only vanity. It was deeper and uglier than that.

I loved discovering the private fractures people tried to hide.

The twitch in a mouth before a confession.

The tremor in breath before someone said they missed me.

The way yearning rearranged a face until the person looked younger, almost helpless.

I told myself I loved their humanity.

Maybe I did.

But I also loved the power of being the reason it appeared.

That is the part I buried.

That is the part that waited.

After the theatre boy, I started noticing how easily people offered themselves to an idea of me.

Not me.

An idea.

A girl with soft eyes. A girl who listened. A girl who seemed wounded but not dangerous. A girl who made men feel chosen by allowing them to comfort her.

I became very good at being almost honest.

Almost honest is better than lying.

Lies can be disproven.

Almost honesty leaves a person filling in the blanks with their own longing.

I would say, “I’m just scared.”

And they would imagine tenderness.

I would say, “I don’t want to be hurt again.”

And they would imagine history.

I would say, “Sometimes I feel too much.”

And they would imagine depth.

None of it was false.

That was the worst part.

I did feel too much.

I was scared.

I had been hurt.

But I learned that pain, when arranged beautifully, becomes a key.

I met boys who wanted to save me.

Men who wanted to understand me.

Soft-handed, open-hearted people who mistook my trembling for trust.

They moved close.

Then closer.

Then too close.

And the moment I felt truly seen, the sweetness in me changed temperature.

Not into hatred.

Into alarm.

If they saw me, they could reject me.

If they knew me, they could name me.

If they named me, I would become fixed.

And if I became fixed, then I could be judged.

So I closed the door first.

Gently.

Always gently.

I would grow distant. Then apologetic. Then wounded by their confusion. If they asked what changed, I made their asking the problem.

“You’re overwhelming me.”

“I don’t feel safe when you push.”

“I need space.”

Space sounded healthy.

Space was where I could disappear without looking cruel.

If they cried, I became calm.

If they begged, I became smaller.

If they were angry, I became frightened.

And when they finally doubted themselves, I knew I was safe again.

I am not proud of that.

I swear I am not.

But pride has never tamed instinct.

This was before the death.

Before the headlines.

Before the word sociopathic attached itself to my name like a second skin.

This was before anyone had a reason to fear me.

And still, looking back, I can see the outline.

A girl who wanted goodness so badly she learned how to perform it.

A girl who wanted love so badly she learned how to control its exits.

A girl who mistook being needed for being chosen.

There was one boy no, not him, not the theatre boy.

Another.

A gentle one.

He met me in a bookstore near the religious section. I remember because I was holding a book about prayer and not reading it.

He said, “You look like you’re searching for something.”

I smiled.

“What do you think I’m searching for?”

He looked embarrassed by his own sincerity.

“A reason to stay.”

That should have frightened me.

It didn’t.

It moved me.

His name was Elias.

For a few weeks, Elias made me believe I could begin again.

He did not hunger at me the way others did. He did not rush toward my beauty or my sadness. He asked questions and waited through the answers. He noticed when I grew quiet and did not punish me for it.

Once, while walking me home, he said, “You don’t have to become easy for me.”

I nearly cried.

Then I nearly hated him for making me nearly cry.

Tenderness can feel like invasion when you have survived by arranging yourself.

With Elias, I tried to be good.

Not impressive.

Not adored.

Good.

I answered honestly when I could. I did not vanish for three days just to see whether he would panic. I did not turn every silence into a test. I prayed for him without making the prayer about myself.

But the old fear returned.

It always did.

What if he saw me and left?

What if he stayed and saw more?

What if the thing inside me was not pain, but character?

At night, the dreams began.

Water.

Hands beneath the surface.

Faceless men reaching upward, mouths open, not accusing me exactly, but asking something I could not bear to hear.

Sometimes I stood above them.

Sometimes I was drowning with them.

Sometimes I woke with my hands clenched in the sheets, whispering, “I didn’t mean it.”

The old prayer.

The first language of my fear.

I went back to church more often.

I sat in the sanctuary when it was nearly empty and watched light fall through the stained glass in broken colors.

I wanted God to interrupt me.

That is the honest truth.

I wanted a sign strong enough to overpower interpretation.

Not a feeling.

Not a verse that could mean several things.

Not a coincidence I would have to turn over and over until my mind bled.

I wanted certainty.

I wanted heaven to speak in a way even I could not misunderstand.

Because I was tired.

So tired.

Tired of being tender.

Tired of being watched by my own thoughts.

Tired of carrying a soul I could not inspect.

One evening, after Elias walked me home, he paused at the bottom of my porch steps.

The sky behind him was violet. The streetlamps had just begun to hum.

“I like you,” he said.

Plainly.

No performance.

No poetry.

Just the sentence, standing there with its hands open.

Something in me panicked.

Not because I did not want it.

Because I wanted it too much.

I wanted to step into that sentence and live there. I wanted to be remade by it. I wanted him to say it again and again until every uncertain thing inside me became quiet.

Instead, I heard myself say, “You shouldn’t.”

His face changed.

Only a little.

A small injury.

Fresh and confused.

“Why?”

There it was.

The door.

The question too close to the truth.

I could have told him.

Because I do not know where my love ends.

Because I am afraid that if you touch the real me, you will pull your hand back.

Because I have spent my whole life trying to be good, and I still do not know if goodness is in me or only on me.

But I said nothing.

I only smiled sadly.

The kind of smile people forgive.

Then I went inside.

That night, I prayed until my throat hurt.

I prayed for Elias.

For the theatre boy.

For every person who had ever mistaken me for safe.

For the girl I had been.

For the woman I was becoming.

I asked God to stop me if I was wrong.

I asked Him to correct me.

I asked Him to make me clean.

The room stayed silent.

The ceiling held its darkness.

My hands trembled against the blanket.

“Please,” I whispered. “Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Nothing.

Then

not thunder.

Not light.

Not a miracle anyone else would have noticed.

Only my name.

Soft.

Familiar.

Like someone remembering me from before I was born.

Shay.

I stopped breathing.

The silence after it felt alive.

And for the first time in my life, I was not alone with the question.

THE END