Incomplete, By Design

I once believed the world arrived as a complete set. Earth below, sky above. Instructions included.

That belief did not survive adulthood.

Some days, I wake up with the earth firmly under my feet. The coffee tastes right. The calendar makes sense. I answer emails like a functioning human. Gravity behaves. On those days, I think, This must be it. This must be what people mean when they say things are finally coming together.

Then there are other days. Days when the sky does not show up at all.

I still wake up, of course. The earth is there- heavy, demanding, unimpressed by my confusion. But the sky, the sense of direction or meaning or possibility, has quietly taken the day off. I look up anyway, out of habit, like someone checking for a signal that was never promised.

When I step outside, I notice everyone else moving with purpose. Or at least with convincing performances of it. Faces tilted down toward phones, forward toward obligations, inward toward private negotiations with life. Everyone looks busy surviving their own story. Everyone is carrying something invisible and sharp. We pass each other politely, like strangers sharing an elevator during an emotional emergency no one wants to name.

I have words. This has always been true. I can explain things. Feelings. Reasons. I can speak carefully or passionately, softly or too much. But somewhere along the way, I learned that language does not guarantee connection. I talk, and people hear sentences, not meaning. I offer sincerity; it lands as information. Having a tongue, I realized, does not mean finding someone who speaks the same inner language. It just means you become fluent in being misunderstood.

Time watches all of this with professional detachment.

It burns, slowly and without spectacle. A fire with no smoke. No alarms. No visible damage. Just heat. Memories surface when I least invite them- old conversations, missed chances, things I said too late or never said at all. The past does not shout. It simmers. I wonder if anyone has ever truly extinguished these embers, or if maturity is simply learning how to sit closer to the fire without flinching.

Love exists. I know this the way one knows gravity exists- through evidence, not personal convenience.

I see it in other people’s lives. In photographs. In songs that promise too much and still manage to hurt. Love shows up everywhere, just rarely where I am standing. I look for it in the obvious places, the hopeful places, the places that seem reasonable. Love, however, prefers surprise entrances and poorly timed exits. Sometimes it arrives disguised as a lesson. Sometimes as silence. Sometimes as something I only recognize weeks later, when it is already gone and significantly wiser than I am.

There is humor in all this, whether I want it or not.

I laugh when I realize that on the days I have the earth, I complain about the weight. On the days I glimpse the sky, I panic about falling. I laugh because everyone else seems to be improvising too, pretending they know the choreography when we are all just guessing the next step.

Eventually, something shifts. Not dramatically. No thunder. No montage.

I stop demanding completeness from the world. I stop expecting both earth and sky on the same day. I learn that sometimes stability is enough. Sometimes longing is enough. Sometimes the fire is just part of the furniture.

I keep speaking my language, even if it echoes back strangely. I keep walking, even when the direction feels symbolic at best. I stop waiting for the world to assemble itself properly before I participate.

The world, I understand now, was never meant to be whole.

Neither was I.

And somehow, that unfinished symmetry feels less like a flaw and more like an invitation- to live anyway, to laugh when I can, to look up even when the sky is missing, and to trust that meaning does not require perfection to exist.