Bruce Merrill

You think the open mind keeps you free. Watch what happens the moment someone questions what you believe.

You think the ache comes from not getting it. It started the moment your hand began to move.

The thoughts haven't slowed. What changed is who I think I am inside them.

Point at your hand. You see your hand. Point at the place everyone calls your face, and the finger arrives at the room.

Sometimes the question isn't looking for an answer. It's the shape the avoidance takes when it learns to sound like searching.

Some pain isn't a malfunction. It's a measurement of how close you stood to something worth losing.

Your tastes were planted before you could consent. The exhaustion isn't from living. It's from pretending you were the one steering.

Happiness isn't false. It's misfiled. You keep looking for it under achievements. It lives under stillness.

The people you know best are the ones you see least clearly. At some point checking stopped feeling necessary, and the sketch replaced the person.

The hum was never about the thing. The hum was the reaching. The thing was just somewhere to point it.

Not every feeling is a message. Some are just weather. The trouble starts when you ask the rain what it wants from you.

You can spend years looking for what was already waiting wherever you stopped. The search itself was the locked door.

The day didn't drain you. The argument you were having with it did.

Not the one in the photographs. The one who was here before you learned which parts of yourself to bring forward.

You've been asking so loudly you couldn't hear it agree. The quiet isn't where the answer arrives. The quiet is the answer.

Notice the thought. Now notice the noticing. Whatever was already there before the question is what you're looking for.

What you covered to keep going didn't disappear. It waited, the way seeds wait. Quiet isn't the same as gone.

Two lives moving in the same direction, never meeting. The closeness you mistook for connection was just synchronized loneliness.

You assume something must be pulling you. Look up. The ceiling is empty. The dance was always yours.

Between the thing that happens and the story you tell about it, there's a small unguarded second. That's where you actually live.

Strip away the roles, the names, the things you've been called. Whatever doesn't leave is the part worth knowing.

Chasing it is the surest way to be the one thing it can't catch. The pursuit and the absence have always been the same shape.

Strip everything else and this is what's left. The air you didn't ask for, arriving on schedule, asking nothing back.

What was given freely wasn't meant to be earned. The trying to deserve it is what kept you from receiving it.

The ones you'd say if you knew were never the ones you waited to be ready for. Readiness was the delay disguised as preparation.

Not yours. Not mine. One. The line between us was a sentence we agreed to keep speaking.

The morning you stopped waiting for it to mean something is the morning it began to. Ordinary was the disguise the sacred was wearing.

Not a posture. Not a practice. Just the absence of the thing you'd been doing without noticing.

Not made. Not summoned. Already here, the way the sky is already there above the weather.

Something in you the day cannot reach. Watch closely. It was never the part that was tired.

Not narrow. Not steep. The path was wide enough for all of you. You were the one walking sideways.

Not what you do for someone. What stops happening between you when you stop performing the version of yourself you think they want.

Not a place. Not an arrival. The recognition that you never actually left.