You Are It

 Long before men and everything they know existed, God put together a woman as an experiment. She sat on a chair and maintained a profound stillness, believing that any sound she made would taint the essence of it. If you asked her what it was, she’d tell you that was it. She was up to her neck in wonder and resembled, on bad days, a woman drowning on land. The itch of curiosity was inevitable, the thirst for wisdom was a built-in craving. Yet, she declared with fervor, to make a sound would be to desecrate it. She remained motionless, her limbs rigid, her gaze fixed, observing and adoring from a distance. Any deeper involvement would defile the sacred object of her curiosity.

As a child, she had once plucked a rose, cruel in her naivety, and put it in a vase by her bed, mesmerized by its unfolding beauty that seemed to swell beyond its petals, eternal and aloof. She looked up to it, and wanted to learn the art of opening up without revealing a single thing. But the rose gradually withered, its delicate petals wrinkling, its vibrant pink fading into a brittle brown. And it died like a martyr holding tight to its secrets. It was then she first pondered the necessity of thorns: they were guards, fierce in their duty to protect it. And so, she learned the art of self-defense from a decaying rose. 

Now, aged and wiser, anchored to that chair, she knew better than to ever pluck the rose again. The only way to know a thing was to never let the thing know you were there to know it, to watch without being seen, and know without being known. To be known was terrifying. Equally terrifying was the knowing, akin to possessing the world's most potent weapon without knowing how to wield it. So— she remained silent, only ever saying, “We are meant to ask questions, not to receive answers. The pursuit of it is it."

Years cemented her to that chair, her body warping, growing rigid with time. She asked herself what dying was. Perhaps God, too, was searching for it, and she was the rose on His nightstand. She wasn't dying from old age but from protecting it, her mortality turning into her sharpest weapon. And long after her flesh faded, her bones would linger— a reminder for Him that creation was doomed and He would never know it. And so, He made men. And so, He remained quiet, anonymous, hidden. 

His indifference, His distance, His silence, made Him it.