The longest seven days of my life were spent in a withered yellow orchard when I was thirteen.
Back then, I thought faith was an unbreakable rock. I did not yet know that something invisible and intangible could be so sharp.
Sharp enough to peel open a person's life so easily.
The blight in my hometown spread as silently as a plague. In the orchard, the tangerine trees lost their green one after another, their leaves curling as if scorched.
My parents had long since given up. They sat all day in the dim house, waiting for the same fate as the other fruit farmers.
But I had not.
Beneath the oldest tangerine tree in the orchard, I prayed.
One day, two days, three days—
My knees sank into the mud, and my lips cracked from thirst.
On the fourth day, I heard the neighbors crying. They had decided to burn down their orchard and move elsewhere.
On the fifth day, my older brother tried to drag me back into the house. He said I had gone mad, that a great god high above would never bend down to listen to the prayers of lowly people like us.
On the sixth day, I could barely hear my own voice anymore. All that remained before my eyes was a sheet of withered yellow.
At dusk on the seventh day, when the setting sun soaked through the sky, She came.
She was not the gentle, kindly woman depicted in the stained-glass windows of the town Church, but a presence as warm as sunlight.
I could not see Her face, but I could feel the gaze that fell upon me, like a mother watching her sleeping child.
"Why persist?" Her voice was like a fresh breeze blowing through the orchard.
"Because these trees