I am forced to believe in meaning because I believe in my core that I have meaning, and if I have meaning, and everything is me, everything must have meaning. If everything must have meaning, even the waiting has meaning, even the silence has meaning, even the boredom has meaning, even the ache I can’t name and the joy I can’t hold onto have meaning and the patterns I keep repeating like a prayer I didn’t mean to memorize have meaning. If I start to believe any of it is empty then I have to believe that I might be empty too. That thought is unbearable so I gather scraps of meaning like fallen twigs, like old receipts, like dreams I only half remember, holding them up to the light to pretend they are whole, pretend they are holy, pretend the way I feel when I see the sun flicker through dirty blinds or hear a stranger laugh like someone I used to love is proof of something larger than coincidence, because if not, what am I doing here, what are we doing here, why does anything move me if it isn’t all part of something, some current pulling me forward, some echo of a bigger truth I used to know before I was born and will remember again after I die, again and again, maybe, or maybe not, maybe this is it, maybe this desperate grasping is the meaning, maybe meaning is made in the reaching, in the refusing to stop reaching, even when the reaching hurts, especially when it hurts, because pain is proof of care and care is proof of connection and connection is meaning in motion. I want to stay in motion because to stop is to fall and to fall is to forget and I don’t want to forget that I meant something, even if just to myself, even if just once, even if just now, because now is all I have and all I’ve ever had dressed up in different outfits, enmeshing with past and future, pretending to be memory and hope. Now, wearing old perfume and borrowed clothes and calling itself yesterday, now, whispering hot promises and calling itself tomorrow, and I keep falling head over heels for it because I want to believe in time, I want to believe in momentum, in progress, in the idea that I am going somewhere, that all this is taking me somewhere, that I am not just a snow globe shaken by invisible hands for invisible reasons, but a path, a pattern, a becoming, and if I am becoming then I must be meant to become, and if I am meant to become then I am held, and if I am held then I am loved, and if I am loved then meaning is not just a story I’m telling myself to survive but the air in my lungs and the hum beneath everything, the thing I hear in quiet moments that isn’t silence at all but some low, constant truth trying to speak to me in a language I’m still learning, one built out of glances and accidents and everything I thought I lost but didn’t, not really, because it all lives here, in me, in this mess of thoughts and feelings and contradictions I call a self, which is maybe just a container for meaning, a jar for wonder like jars of fireflies in the summertime, a mouth for the universe to speak through when it forgets how to use stars, when it needs a softer vessel, something with skin and softness and scars, something that aches and breaks and still comes back to try again, because trying is sacred too, the flawed reaching, the messy faith, the whispered what-if under the breath when no one is listening, and maybe no one ever is, maybe the point is to say it anyway, to write it anyway, to cry and laugh and build and dance and leave halfway through anyway, because showing up counts even when you’re late, even when you don’t know what you’re showing up for, and maybe that’s what makes it real, the fact that I keep showing up, that I keep waking up and naming the sky, that I keep risking being misunderstood, keep risking being wrong, keep risking being soft in a world that rewards the brittle, the sharp, the easily explained, and I don’t want to be easily explained, I want to be impossible and obvious and holy and forgettable all at once, I want to be the kind of contradiction that can only exist in poems and people, I want to crack open a moment so wide that God can walk through it barefoot, nodding, saying yes, this too, yes, even this, and maybe that’s all faith is—saying yes even when I don’t understand the question, nodding even when I’m scared, loving even when I’m not sure it’s safe, and it never is, but I do it anyway because the alternative is numbness and I’ve been numb before and it’s not peace, it’s not quiet, it’s not safe either, it’s cold and sticky and grey, and I am not made to be cold, I am made to burn, to warm, to throb with meaning even when it bruises, because pain reminds me I’m inside something, inside this life, inside this body, inside this world I didn’t choose but continue to choose, and maybe choice is meaning too, the daily choosing, the refusal to disappear, the way I keep stitching beauty into the hours like embroidery no one asked for but that’s not the point, the point is I’m here, I’m still here, and as long as I’m here, I get to mean something, even if only in fragments, even if only in echoes, even if only in the small miracle of knowing I existed at all.