Sometimes it is lupus.

It begins, as most dangerous things do, with certainty.

He has always distrusted certainty — that clean, arrogant sound it makes when it enters a room uninvited. Truth, he learned early on, rarely announces itself. It prefers disguises. Symptoms. Smiles that arrive a second too late. Questions that ache long after the answer is given.

Inside him lives a city with no map. Corridors loop back on themselves. Doors open only when they sense the correct doubt. He walks there alone, not because he prefers solitude, but because no one else survives the altitude. His mind does not seek peace; it seeks accuracy, even if accuracy draws blood.

People mistake his silence for control. They are wrong. Silence is simply where the noise has learned to kneel.

Desire moves through him like a diagnosis that refuses to settle — not hunger, not romance, but a charged awareness of proximity. The way air changes when someone understands him almost enough. The way tension becomes intimate when words are withheld deliberately. He does not touch often, but when he does, it is never accidental. Even absence becomes a form of contact.

He is drawn to complexity the way others are drawn to warmth. He does not want to be healed; he wants to be understood. Preferably by someone intelligent enough to know that understanding is temporary. Every connection is provisional. Every explanation a working theory.

They ask him why he looks amused when things fall apart. He never answers directly. How could he explain that collapse is simply revelation with better timing?

Sometimes the pain is metaphorical. Sometimes it is chemical. Sometimes it wears a hundred masks and answers to none of their names.

And sometimes — inconveniently, mockingly, beautifully —
it’s lupus.

He smiles at that thought. Not because it’s funny, but because it reminds him of the oldest rule he lives by:

The mind is never lying.
It is only speaking a language most people are too afraid to learn.

Understanding, he suspects, is not revelation.

It behaves more like subtraction, though he is never entirely sure what is being removed — illusion, excess, or simply urgency.

At some point the questions change. Not who, not even why, but how. How patterns repeat while insisting on novelty. How intensity borrows the tone of truth without always carrying its burden. How depth can feel indistinguishable from inevitability, especially when examined too closely.

He used to believe insight announced itself — dramatic, conclusive, impossible to ignore. Lately it arrives differently. Incremental. Almost administrative. Not as a moment, but as a process that resists being summarised.

There is, always, the temptation to mythologize the wound. To assume that pain must contain instruction, that disruption implies intention. Yet it is not clear whether meaning precedes coherence, or merely follows it out of habit.

What shifts is not the self, but the confidence with which certain narratives were once held.

He notices how easily intimacy is confused with exposure. As though proximity guaranteed accuracy. As though saying everything were the same as being known. But knowledge seems to require a particular kind of distance — not the kind that excludes, but the kind that clarifies.

Detachment, he considers, may not be the absence of feeling, but a temporary suspension of its authority.

There are systems that persist by remaining ambiguous. Whether this ambiguity is depth or strategy is difficult to determine. Naming such systems feels neither violent nor benevolent — merely provisional. A working hypothesis rather than a verdict.

And so the work continues, though more quietly now.

Fewer rehearsed explanations. Fewer conversations imagined to completion. Less confidence that recurrence necessarily implies fate.

One observation remains unresolved:

If something must remain mysterious in order to retain its power, is the mystery essential — or simply convenient?

Sometimes clarity feels merciful. Sometimes restraint does. Sometimes care takes the form of not insisting on conclusion.

The disciplined mind, he suspects, does not rush to release its findings. It allows them to remain usable.

Not everything that resists interpretation is profound. Not every shadow conceals depth. But not every unanswered question is ready to be closed.

And some — frustratingly, persistently — refuse to decide whether they are diagnosis or metaphor.

Some stories do not end in transformation. Others end only in temporary classification.

Sometimes it is lupus.
Sometimes it only behaves like one.