The Last Riddle Refuses an Answer

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.