Fragments of Cassandra

My mind has never known how to be one thing.
It is a library built too tall-
books left open on the floor, 
papers spilling from drawers, 
cabinet doors never quite closed;

because when I go searching for one answer, 
I come back carrying twelve questions.

I have never cared much for what.
Give me the why.

Why grief settles into the body. 
Why cruelty grows in certain minds. 
Why colors can make a canvas ache. 
Why heat, pressure, water, and time 
can turn something bitter into 
something worth savoring.

Even coffee cannot simply be coffee.
It becomes chemistry, patience, ritual- 
proof that ordinary things become beautiful
when every small step is allowed to matter.

Perhaps life is brewed much the same.
My mind loves the world by taking it apart.
Not to ruin it-
to understand how the pieces learned to belong.

Psychology slips into my paintings. 
Science becomes metaphor. 
Art teaches me how to read people. 
Pain becomes language.

Everything I learn, 
eventually reaches across the shelves 
and touches something I already knew.

Some call that wandering.

They see too many roads, 
too many interests, 
too many versions of me 
and mistake curiosity for indecision.

But they cannot see the map from inside the maze.
Nothing here is wasted.

Every obsession leaves a book behind. 
Every craft teaches my hands another language.
Every person becomes another universe
that I ache to understand.

I collect knowledge the way others collect photographs;
proof that I was here, 
that I noticed, 
that this strange world was worth another question.

And sometimes, the library is deafening.
Every book falls open at once. 
One thought breeds another 
until I have followed the thread so far 
I forget where I first picked it up.

But then-
I write.

And the room begins to arrange itself.
Metaphors become a filing system. 
Symbolism becomes a shelf. 
The scattered pieces crawl toward one another
and confess they were connected all along.

Even pain comes here.

When something breaks me, I study the fracture.
I trace it backward, ask what, then why, then what lived beneath the why.

Understanding does not stop the bleeding.
I can know the anatomy of heartbreak and still have a heart that breaks.
But knowing the wound sometimes teaches me how to carry it.

So I read. I question. I dismantle. I create. I write.
Perhaps intelligence was never having all the answers.
Perhaps mine lives in the refusal to stop asking.

My mind has never known how to be one thing.
I hope it never learns.

Let it remain a crowded library, 
an unfinished canvas, 
a cup growing cold beside an open book, 
a thousand scattered fragments 
waiting for me to discover why I kept them.

And somewhere among all that beautiful disorder-
a desk, a blank page,
and me,
giving everything I have ever wondered
somewhere to belong.


Be'ahava,
The Mourning Bird