Field Notes on Certainty

When cartographers drew sea monsters

at the edges of their maps,

they weren’t wrong—

the unknown always has teeth.

I’ve seen truth bend like a river,

finding new paths to the sea,

watched it shimmer in heat waves

rising from summer roads.

What we call fact

is just the shortest distance

between two points of belief.

Ask any quantum particle.

My grandmother swore

she could feel storms coming

in her bones. The weather report

was never as precise.

Some nights, I dream in equations—

perfect proofs dissolving by morning,

leaving only the taste

of certainty behind.

Children know:

their monsters under beds

are as real as taxes,

as death, as gravity.

Truth lives in the space

between what we see

and what we can imagine seeing.

Like light behaving

as both wave and particle,

reality splits itself

to fit our observation.

What’s truer:

the aurora’s colors,

or the magnetic fields

that paint them?

Every memory rewrites itself

each time I remember.

Perhaps that’s the only honesty.

Truth is not a compass

pointing north—

it’s the journey of the needle

trembling, searching.