Fragments of an Unfinished Comprehension

The fear of not knowing, of stepping barefoot into the soil that has no name, sits with me like a second skin. The fear of what is not yet made, not yet seen, what trembles at the edge of becoming. It swells, enormous, enough to swallow the world whole. Is this what it means to approach the new? The novel? To tremble in your own space, awaiting some quiet reckoning?

Is this what it means to be human? Or is it just me?

All my life has been a desperate dance with meaning, an exhausting, tender war to unravel the world around me. I’ve tried to peel it back, to dismantle the noise, to organize the mess, fragment by fragment. But I always fall short. And when I do, I fall so hard that even the illusion of understanding shatters into a thousand pieces I can no longer name.

I do not know what’s coming. But I ache for it. I ache and tremble in equal measure. There is excitement, yes—but it’s the kind that burns at the edges of dread. I know only this: it will not be the same. It will never be the same again. It will be something else—something I’ve never met before. Neither entirely good nor wholly cruel. Just new.

And so I practice the art of letting go—again and again—so that I might hold what’s yet to arrive. I think that, maybe, this is the secret heartbeat of life: to bear the weight of the unknown and not collapse under it.

Yet I stumble. I want time to pause—to be suspended in this now, this breath, this bedroom. I want to sleep in my bed and wake to the same morning light. I want to sit at the same table, with the people I love arranged like offerings around me. I want to cut a flower and have it live. I want it to stay bright, to never wilt, to be mine—and remain mine, forever.

But it won’t. Nothing does.

And that’s the grief I carry in my palms each morning.