The Cathedral of the Virgin of Self-Ignorance

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I once knew a man who tried to hold his own face in place, as if it were always trying to slip off and wander into the woods without him. His name doesn’t matter—names rarely do in places where the ceiling blossoms like an upside-down orchard of stone ribs and whispered geometry. He told me once, over weak coffee and strong silence, that the world inside his head was much larger than the world outside it. I believed him. Anyone would, if they saw what lived above his eyebrows.

There was a cathedral in there—this one, the one you’re looking at—where the arches grew like curious plants. Every column bent the way a question does, leaning toward some answer nobody had the courage to say aloud. The floor wasn’t a floor at all, but a series of soft, flowing lines, like a river that forgot how to be water and decided to be a drawing instead.

Right above the man’s forehead hung a spinning checkered funnel, like a cosmic pastry chef had gone mad decorating the universe. At the center of it floated a small world, or maybe a marble he stole from some childhood where he still remembered how to play. It pulsed with the stubborn glow of something that refuses to be solved.

“World without end,” he whispered once, tapping the place where the funnel began. It wasn’t a prophecy. It wasn’t even a thought. It was more like the kind of thing you say when you’ve spent three decades trying to understand your own reflection and finally decide it’s fine if you never do.

He pressed his fingers beneath his eyes the way someone might hold binoculars, except he wasn’t looking out. He was trying to look in deeper, maybe to see if there was still a little boy somewhere in there, hiding behind the architecture.

Sometimes I think he found him. Sometimes I think he didn’t.

Mostly, I think he built this entire interior cathedral just to keep the loneliness from echoing too loudly.

And if you stand in just the right spot—yes, right there—you can hear what he heard:

Not the ringing of bells,
not the humming of stars,
but the soft, tired voice of a man saying,

“I’m still here… aren’t I?”