The insomnia is really hitting tonight, 2 AM and my eyes are wide open, just staring at the glow of this screen, and it gets me thinking, you know, about all the things you carry around, all the little weights that never quite get set down, even after all these years, and I wonder, am I the only one who feels this… this quiet ache for things that just… aren’t true anymore? Or maybe never were, and that’s the real kicker. I remember my grandmother, God rest her soul, a tiny woman with hands like a walnut shell, always smelling faintly of lavender and old paper, and she’d read me stories from the big family Bible, the one with the gold-leaf pages and illustrations that seemed almost alive, Adam and Eve in the Garden, the serpent, the whole beautiful narrative, and I believed it, every single word, with the unshakeable certainty of a child, and it felt so… comforting, like a warm blanket against the cold, scary parts of the world. Creation in seven days, a perfect world, a perfect beginning. It made sense, in a way that nothing else really did back then. But then, you know, life happens, and you get older, and you stumble into things, like, oh, I don’t know, a scholarship to study evolutionary biology, and suddenly you’re in lectures, dimly lit auditoriums, and Dr. Aris is up there, clicking through slides of skulls, and femurs, and stratigraphy, all these layers of time, and the sheer, almost unfathomable depth of it, and the data, it just… accumulates, like sediment, millions and millions of years, not days, and you start seeing the transitions, the minute, incremental changes, a gradual unfolding, not a sudden snap, and it’s not just a theory anymore, it’s… evidence. Overwhelming evidence. And that’s when the dissonance started, I guess you could call it a cognitive load, or maybe just a quiet fracturing, between what my heart wanted to believe, what I’d been taught was the absolute, literal truth, and what my brain was, quite simply, observing, categorizing, analyzing. It wasn't a malicious thing, no sudden rejection, just this slow, almost imperceptible drift, like continental plates moving apart, and I’d sit there, in the library, surrounded by monographs and peer-reviewed articles, and then I’d go home, and sometimes I’d pull out that old family Bible, the scent of lavender still clinging to its pages, and I’d feel this… this sadness. A quiet grief, almost. For a story that was so beautiful, so simple, so complete. I tried, for a while, to reconcile it, you know? To twist the scientific findings into some kind of metaphorical framework, to see the "days" as eons, or to interpret the "kinds" as broad taxonomic groups, but it always felt forced, like trying to fit a square peg into a very, very round hole, and the elegance of both, the science and the scripture, diminished in the attempt, becoming neither fully one nor fully the other, just a muddy compromise, and it left me feeling… restless, untethered. It’s been decades now, and I’m still out here, hustling for gigs, piecing together an income, no pension, no real safety net, just me and my laptop, and sometimes, late at night, when the bills are piling up, and the world feels particularly harsh, I think about that simple faith, that clear-cut narrative of creation, and I wonder if I threw out something essential, something foundational, in pursuit of… accuracy. Is that weird? Does everyone feel this pang of regret for things they couldn’t hold onto? This melancholia for a worldview that just… didn’t hold up to scrutiny? Because it wasn't just about the fossils, or the strata, or the genetic markers, it was about a whole way of understanding the world, a moral framework, a sense of belonging to something ancient and divine, and when that unravels, even gently, even slowly, you’re left with… what? A vast, indifferent universe, and a contingent existence, and that’s a heavy thing to carry, especially when you’re pushing eighty, and you’re still trying to figure out where your next meal is coming from. So yeah, just wondering, anyone else ever feel like they mourned a cosmology? Like they lost a beloved story, not because it was bad, but because it just… wasn’t true, and that truth, however liberating in one sense, left a gaping hole in another? And how do you ever really fill that, or do you just learn to live with the empty space, the quiet echoes of what used to be there? This constant low-grade sorrow, like a faint background hum in the universe.