Sometimes life feels constructed.
Like a set built overnight
while I was sleeping.
People move through it
with scripts I never read.
Time glitches.
Months collapse
into something the size of an afternoon.
Days repeat themselves
until I start to wonder
if somewhere a camera crew
is resetting the scene.
Groundhog Day
with better lighting.
But every now and then
I take the left
instead of the right.
And suddenly
I’m walking down a hallway
that wasn’t finished.
The air feels wrong.
The shadows land
half a step away
from where they belong.
Like the world
wasn’t expecting me
to use my free will
right there.
The place stutters.
Textures missing.
Edges unfinished.
It’s uncomfortable enough
that most days
I turn around
and go back.
Routine.
Familiar ground.
The path that was rendered correctly.
But lately
I’ve been pushing past that.
Further off the map.
Into the woods.
Into the past.
Into the strange quiet rooms
inside my own head.
And sometimes
it feels like those places
might actually be
the same place.
If that’s true,
then maybe this reality
isn’t as fixed
as I was taught to believe.
Maybe thoughts
don’t just interpret the world.
Maybe they build it.
So what happens
if I stop letting fear
design the architecture?
What if I just walk
where I want
and let the environment
catch up later?
I don’t know.
But this.
This writing,
These small rebellions
against the script.
Are the closest
I’ve ever come
to showing someone
what it feels like
when the world flickers
for a second
and I realize
it might not be finished yet.

For most of my life,
someone else held the ruler
and told me how to measure my soul.
Forty plus years
of sermons that sounded like God
but felt more like fences.
Stand here.
Don’t cross that line.
Smile like you believe it.
Then I watched the church
that taught me those rules
collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The pulpit cracking first.
Funny how loud a sermon can be
until you notice
the man preaching it
doesn’t live inside his own words.
That’s when the unraveling began.
Thread by thread
I pulled their fear out of my faith.
Their control out of my conscience.
And what was left
was quieter
but somehow more honest.
Now the air feels different.
Like the first deep breath
after stepping outside
of a building with no windows.
Turns out,
life wasn’t meant to be lived
under a man’s interpretation
of a rulebook he doesn’t follow.
It was meant to be lived
wide open.
With curiosity.
With compassion.
With the freedom to ask questions.
And somewhere in all that rubble
I found something unexpected.
Peace.
The kind that finally lets
a man
be himself.