I spent my youth with a lantern,
leaning into caves of thought,
scraping soot from the ceiling of heaven
to see what pattern might be hiding there.
I asked the sea for its grammar.
It answered in collapse.
I asked the stars for a thesis.
They burned without footnotes.
In libraries, I stacked ladders
against the ribs of old philosophers,
climbed through their arguments
like cathedral rafters—
each beam insisting: higher, higher.
But the ceiling kept receding.
Every revelation arrived
like a door opening onto fog—
not emptiness,
not fullness,
just a widening.
At first I called it failure.
Then I called it tragedy.
Then I called it mystery,
as if renaming could tame it.
Years later, I find myself
sitting in the unfinished room of the world,
windows open,
papers unpinned from the walls.
The question still stands there—
not as a monster,
not as a prize,
but as weather.
Cloud passing.
Light shifting.
And something in me has loosened
its grip on the horizon.
What if meaning is not a treasure
buried at the end of inquiry,
but the steadying of breath
while the map remains blank?
What if the gift is not the answer
but the humility of standing
at the edge of the unsolved
without demanding it kneel?
I watch dust drift through afternoon light.
It does not hurry toward conclusion.
It simply turns,
briefly gold,
before settling.
The riddle has not been solved.
It has been befriended.
And in that friendship
—this quiet accord with the unfinished—
a calm grows roots.
Not because I know.
Not because I will know.
But because I no longer need
the sky to close
around a single, shining point.
It is enough
to live inside the question
and let it remain
vast.