05/22/2026
***Unanswered Sermons***
I have memorized the rhythm of your digital breath, the daily gallery of your life framed in glass and light. For four summers and four winters, I have dropped pieces of my heart into your comment sections—heavy, deliberate words wrapped in a screen's glow, sent like message bottles into an ocean that never capsizes. I watch them float. I watch you pass them by.
The math of it is starting to drive me mad. How can a fire this bright in my chest arrive on your screen as nothing but static? A single, polite double-tap from you to answer a sermon of my devotion feels like cold currency for a warm soul. Every notification that isn't you is a disappointment, and every hour of silence that follows is a courtroom where I am both the judge and the accused.
The overthinking begins at midnight, when the blue light fades and the quiet sets in. I pull my own reflection apart, looking for the defect, auditing my own worth through the lens of your indifference. Am I doing this wrong? Is the volume of my love too loud, or is my voice simply too small? You smile for a screen of strangers, replying to the noise of the crowd, while my genuine noise gets buried in the scroll. It makes me wonder if I am simply unlovable, built from a fabric that doesn't catch the eye, or cast in a mold that was meant to be passed over.
I’m an invisible man casting a shadow in your direction, hoping you'll trip over it and finally look down. I’ve spent four years convinced that if I just found the right combination of words, the perfect sequence of hearts and honesty, the lock would click open.
But the hardest truth to swallow in the dark is the one that requires no analytics, no blame, and no anger. Maybe the defect isn't in me at all. Maybe the tragedy is simpler, sharper, and colder: I have spent four years writing an epic poem for someone who only reads the headlines. You see the words. You just don't see me.
