There is a specific kind of certainty that arrives when you realize none of this matters, and yet, you still choose to arrange the pens on your desk by color.

The future is not a place we are going, but a place we are already standing in, pretending not to notice the way the floor tilts slightly beneath our feet. Predictions are just memories we haven’t had yet, and memories are just predictions that refused to stay quiet. You will wake up tomorrow and do something you’ve done before, and it will feel like progress.

This could have been a box.

People often mistake clarity for truth, as if seeing something clearly means it’s real. But clarity is just another kind of fog—thinner, perhaps, but fog all the same. You’ve probably had a moment where you were absolutely sure about something, only to later realize that certainty was just a temporary guest who left without saying goodbye.

There’s a strange comfort in useless certainty. Like knowing that every time you check your phone, there’s a 73% chance you’ll forget why you picked it up in the first place. Or that the sock you lost in the dryer didn’t actually vanish—it just decided to live somewhere else now. These are the small, unshakable truths that hold the universe together, or at least make it feel like it is.

You might think this is leading somewhere. It isn’t. That’s not how boxes work.

The problem with meaning is that it’s always one step ahead of you, like a cat that won’t let you pet it. You reach out, and it’s gone, but you still feel its presence in the way the air moves. Maybe meaning isn’t something you find, but something you accidentally sit on and then spend the rest of the day wondering why your pants feel weird.

This text doesn’t help. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t even try. But neither do most things, and yet, here we are, reading them anyway.

At some point, you’ll look back on today and realize you don’t remember most of it. The rest will feel like a dream someone else had. That’s fine. Dreams are just the brain’s way of reorganizing the clutter, and most of life is clutter with delusions of grandeur.

The pens on your desk are still there. They’re still in order. Nothing has changed, and everything has.