Every morning, the world arrives
already shouting.
A thousand voices crowd the screen,
each one certain,
each one selling fear
as though fear were truth
and cruelty a form of intelligence.
We have made idols of suspicion.
We call ourselves enlightened
because nothing moves us,
because we can find a flaw
in every act of kindness
and an ulterior motive
behind every open hand.
The clever ones sit beneath bright lights
and explain why hope is naïve,
why tenderness is weakness,
why every bridge conceals a trap.
They speak in sharpened sentences
while cities burn beyond the studio walls,
while children inherit our anger,
while neighbors become enemies
before learning one another’s names.
At forty-three,
I have lived long enough to know
that doubt can be a doorway
or a prison.
There is the doubt that asks,
Is this true?
and waits with an open heart.
Then there is the doubt that says,
Nothing is true,
and bolts every window
before the morning comes.
I have known that darkness.
I have questioned whether the world
would ever let a woman like me
love another woman
without explanation,
without defense,
without first asking permission.
Yet every evening, my wife comes home.
She leaves her keys beside mine.
She tells me about her day.
She reaches across the distance
the world keeps trying to place between us
and takes my hand.
No expert announces this miracle.
No headline considers it news.
Still, here it is:
two women at the kitchen table,
choosing patience over victory,
listening instead of preparing to answer,
building a life from ordinary mercies.
Perhaps wisdom has always been this quiet.
Perhaps it does not need
to humiliate what it disagrees with
or turn uncertainty into despair.
Perhaps true doubt is not a weapon
but a lamp carried gently
into an unfamiliar room.
It does not destroy the mystery.
It helps us see where to step.
So let the shabby emperor keep shouting
from his kingdom of broken mirrors.
I will not kneel.
I will believe in what asks me
to become kinder.
I will believe in questions
that make the heart grow larger.
I will believe that compassion
is not the absence of intelligence
but its highest form.
And when the world insists
there is nothing left to trust,
nothing worth saving,
nothing sacred enough to live by,
I will turn toward my wife,
toward the fragile, stubborn light
we have protected together,
and begin again
with love.
© Susie Stiles-Wolf