The Boy who prayed with eyes closed by Aurelian Razvan Dinu

They said I had a pure soul. A calling. That God had chosen me. That I should be grateful. That I had been saved.

I was sixteen. A teenager—not quite a boy, not yet a man. Not kissed. Not touched. Not even by life.

My mother cried when I told her I wanted to enter the monastery. She thought it was my father’s doing, but it wasn’t. It was something in me. A need for silence. For order. For a kind of holiness, I couldn’t find elsewhere. For a burning desire. For peace. For my inner peace. 

I arrived just before Christmas, wearing my father’s old coat and carrying a cheap rosary purchased at a flea market. The priest at the gate said, “Welcome home, brother.”

Home.

They gave me a new name. A room. A list of prayers. Tasks to complete. Floors to scrub. Windows to polish. Bread to bake. Fasts to keep. I did everything without question. I believed obedience would cleanse me.

I was afraid of the way my body trembled at night. I felt a strange warmth when I saw the older monks bathing behind the wooden shed. I told myself it was just the devil testing me. That I was a sinner. 

And then came Father Sebastian.

He wasn’t like the others. His voice was soft. He touched me when he spoke—a hand on my arm, fingers grazing my neck during a blessing. He asked me to stay after evening prayers to read scripture. We sat close. Maybe too close.

The first time he kissed me, I thought I would die. Passion? Desire? Abuse?

Something seemed to break and grow inside of me at the same time. Like a thin sheet of glass shattering in silence. His hands on my face. His lips pressed into mine. I didn’t resist. I didn’t know how. 

I didn’t want it. And yet—I didn’t want him to stop.

He told me I was chosen. That God had brought us together. That no one would understand. That I was special. Special to whom? To him? Or to God?

I believed him.

I started to wither. I stopped eating. I slept curled up like a dog. I bled some nights—not from wounds, but from somewhere deeper. From guilt. From confusion. From the absence of love where it had been promised.

One night, I fainted during vespers. They took me to the infirmary. I stayed for three days. On the second night, a woman came. Old, with white hair. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She sat by my bed, silent. She had eyes like winter. She was warm and beautiful. Like a pure light after a massive thunderstorm.

She held my hand and whispered, “You can leave, child. You don’t belong here.”

When I awoke, she was gone.

That night, I left.

I walked barefoot through the snow, past the frozen statues, past the chapel where we had first prayed together. I didn’t cry. Not then.

I took a train back to the city. I never told my mother. I told her I got sick. That it wasn’t for me. I don’t think she ever believed me.

Years passed. I tried to forget. But something stayed. Like the smell of incense in old clothes. Like a prayer half-said. One December, I returned to that town with my daughter. She was six. I wanted to show her the gorgeous old painted chapel. I didn’t tell her why we really came.

We lit a candle. She looked up at the painted dome and said, “Did someone you love live here?”

“No,” I said. “He died here.”

She took my hand. Her fingers were warm. Steady.

“Can we say a prayer for him?”

I nodded. She knelt. She closed her eyes.

And I did too.

For all the days and nights, I felt loved. For all the kisses I kept. For all the memoriesI sometimes  miss.

And for the boy I used to be.

Aurelian Razvan Dinu is a London-based visual artist and writer, originally from Romania. His work explores themes of survival, identity, and memory, moving between painting and text. “The Boy Who Prayed with Eyes Closed” is part of a wider body of work around voice and personal history.