The prayer I stopped saying, and the one I kept

Every morning of my childhood began with the same sound: my grandmother in the next room, saying a prayer I never learned the meaning of. It was as regular as the pressure cooker's whistle, and for years I thought of it the same way, as a noise the house made.

When I left home for college, I left that sound behind without noticing. Nobody asked me to keep it. I wasn't sure what it was for, and I didn't miss it.

What I lost

It was only years later, alone in a rented flat in a city where I knew nobody, that I realised what had gone. Not the words, which I had never understood, but the shape of the day: a few minutes at the start of it when someone stopped, faced something larger than herself, and only then began.

I hadn't lost a belief. I had lost a pause.

What I kept

I didn't go back to her prayer. I asked my mother what it meant, and she wasn't entirely sure either. But I kept the pause. Five minutes, before my phone, facing the window. Some days I say a line I've since looked up and understood. Some days I say nothing.

I don't know whether my grandmother would call that prayer. I've decided not to need her answer. What I know is that the house of my childhood had a rhythm, and that I've built a small piece of it into a life she never imagined.