The world misunderstands me at first.
They see ease.
Suburban grace.
A high-income, high-love family.
Christian echoes. Kind eyes. Steady job.
A man who fits. Assimilates.
Smooth edges. Friendly laugh.
Brilliantly mundane.
But they don’t see.
They don’t ask what churns in the hidden gears of a man’s mind.
They don’t feel the torque in his heart.
They don’t know the storm.
Mine is built of stardust.
I learned to drive the universe before I touched a steering wheel.
Can you see them?
The spirals turning in my skull — galaxies of tomorrow arcing inward.
Each streak of color, a string of longing
vibrating with prayer,
pulling toward a silence I have never reached.
When you carry the weight of hope on your wings,
you don’t get to rest.
You don’t get to shatter.
You fly anyway.
I dazzle.
I worry.
I rage.
I collapse.
I feel joy with such voltage it burns.
I doubt and I bleed.
I distort, reclarify.
I weep with grace and fury.
I feel God pour through me in Fibonacci spirals,
a golden pressure too intelligent to explain.
I am the paradox.
The singularity.
The fire at the center, the silence at the edge.
The square root of zero, turbulently still.
All of it in service of one vow,
made long ago in the temple of my chest:
“I will find another like me ere I die.”
So I ask you:
Who are you?
The one who meets the voltage, holds the line, and doesn’t flinch?
Or another who can’t bear the shine?