Part I · Wonder

Wonder

when i was young, riding in my parents' car, i used to lean against the window and fog the glass with my breath. i'd draw smiley faces toward the moon as she followed us home, hoping she would know she wasn't alone. i don't remember when i learned the moon wasn't following me. i only remember the sound my breath made against the window. the sound of my own giggle when i was certain the moon had finally found a friend. she was beautiful to me. but she always looked lonely. yes, she had the stars, and i imagined they spoke to her when i couldn't. still, they never felt like enough. so i learned the names my ancestors had given them. orion. hydra. ursa major. ursa minor. i learned their stories because i thought she deserved them. stories bigger than mine. stories worthy of her attention, so she wouldn't have to cross the night alone. like orion. like perseus. like every name my ancestors carved into the sky and found themselves within. the hunter. the fearless swordsman. men who carried faith, honor, and grace as though they had always known who they were. i admired them. maybe because i hoped someone might tell my story someday. or maybe i simply wanted to become someone worth looking up to. i didn't know it then. i just knew i wanted to be the one who arrived when someone needed him. the older i became, the less the stories were enough. i wanted to know why the moon always found me. why the stars stayed. why the night felt so impossibly alive. so i started asking different questions. the answers changed. the wondering never did. somewhere along the way, mythology became astronomy. stories became equations. the questions remained the same. and i found myself baring my soul to the big bang. i thought the deeper i looked, the closer i would get. the moon became a satellite. the stars became furnaces. constellations dissolved into distances too vast for the mind to hold. pure energy. nuclear fire. hydrogen becoming helium. helium becoming carbon. fourteen billion years spent learning how to become me. stars consumed themselves until they could no longer carry their own light. they collapsed. everything they had become became us. i used to think mythology and science were opposites. one was imagination. the other was discovery. the older i get, the less convinced i become. both begin with someone staring into the night, refusing to believe silence is enough of an answer. why are we here? neither has ever stopped asking. we searched the sky to give it shape. gave myths of men to what was natural, biological, & divine. sublime, we reached into the night to make sense of stars we were never built to read. so i wrote to you, god. letter after letter. wonder after wonder. prayer after prayer. i kept waiting for certainty. not proof. not miracles. just enough of an answer to quiet the part of me that never stopped looking out the car window. instead, every answer became another question. & i waited for your breath. the more i searched, the less interested i became in being right. i wandered through philosophy, physics, scripture, and history, hoping one of them would finally feel like home. none of them completed me. each held a fragment of something larger, as though every generation had inherited a different piece of the same impossible conversation. but here i stand scouring the stars for your name scratching constellations into the darkness like a wound. i used to think faith meant certainty. now i wonder if faith is simply refusing to stop searching after certainty never arrives. because i still don't know how to surrender my life to a voice i have never heard say my name. i searched the stars. i searched equations. i searched scripture. eventually... there was nowhere left to look except inward. the farther i searched, the more i realized i wasn't looking for knowledge. i was looking for home. not because i expected to find god there. because i had exhausted every other direction. i sat with myself longer than i ever had before. i peeled back every identity i had spent years trying to become. the hero. the believer. the skeptic. the son. the father. the friend. piece by piece, they fell away, until all that remained was the quiet question beneath them all. my lungs keep making space for your absence. every inhale, a hope. every exhale, another prayer returning unanswered. even the stars— consuming hydrogen, fusing helium, collapsing beneath their own impossible weight— cannot teach me how to carry silence. yet every morning, i breathe as though something is still breathing with me. the moon never needed me. she never heard my stories. she never followed our car. none of that was ever true. but somehow, the wondering was. it never left. so every now and then, when the glass fogs beneath my breath, i still find myself wanting to draw one more smile— just in case someone out there needs to know they aren't alone.