i stopped asking what it means. Not out of despair — despair still wants an answer, still grieves the god who left. This is different. This is refusal. i looked at the essence I'd built to replace the doctrine i'd abandoned, and i saw the same architecture underneath both: an invisible thing i was arranging my life around, asking it to hold me upright. i took the invisible thing away. I did not fall.

 

What's left is not nothing. It's this — the fact of being here, unexplained, uninsured by any spirit or self-help scripture or cosmic ledger, and going on anyway. i am not on the spectrum from devotion to doubt to certainty. I got off it. There is no final stage waiting to redeem the ones before it, no synthesis where the kneeling and the standing resolve into something clean.

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So i revolt — not loudly, not against anyone in particular, but against the whole shape of needing a because and a cause. i exist with none. That's the whole of it, and it turns out to be enough: not meaning, not its absence, just the plain unbearable fact of continuing, which i no longer need a name for.