After Mystery

Photo by Yuvraj Singh Parmar on Unsplash

The brain is lazy in the most loving way. 

It carves a path and then prefers it — the way water doesn't reinvent the slope each morning, just finds the channel it already made.

Dopamine is a homebody. It would rather light up the known than risk the unprecedented. Scientists call them neural pathways. I know how you take your eggs, your coffee. I know what chair you pull at the dinner table, the side of the bed you sleep on without thinking.

We are not spontaneous creatures. We are creatures who learned each other so thoroughly that your predictability became my native language — and fluency is a form of tenderness.

 I yawn when you do. I laugh just before you do. I even started watching European soccer. I learned the rules just to have somewhere to put my eyes on Sunday afternoons.

I know the joke you're about to make. I know which news story will keep you up and how you'll pace the kitchen with it.

Some would say this is the end of mystery. I think it's luxury.

The autoroutes in our neurochemistry run toward the comfortable, the repeated, the face we have memorized down to the exact crinkle that means "yes, but ask me again later."

This doesn't mean we cannot evolve. We just don't need to build from scratch to prove we are moving. 

I know what it takes to reshape the mind. I had to unlearn an entire lifetime to step into prayer— to loosen every reflex that wasn't mine, to make room for something truer. 

That is not a small thing. It is the hardest work a person does.

So when I say I know your grooves, I mean it the way someone knows exactly what it costs to change. 

And I chose you anyway. I choose you still. 

I keep choosing the channel we made, 
after mystery.