The Fool

Manifest quietly. Do not assume you know.

I left the city at dawn with nothing but a blank notebook and an appetite for weather. The city wasn’t evil. It was just loud. It blinked and demanded and measured. It made people march in invisible lines until the lines felt like laws. I didn’t hate it. I just stopped answering.

I walked until the architecture softened into trees. I listened to birds that had never heard of productivity. I watched the river do its one great job, moving, without needing applause.

Halfway across a small wooden bridge, a voice rose from below it.

“Name your purpose.”

The Troll stepped into view like a thought you can’t swallow back down. Not large. Precise. Eyes like a ledger.

“I don’t have one,” I said, because it was the truth.

He smiled like a man who has never been surprised.

“Then you’re lying,” he said. “Everyone has a purpose. Even if it’s hidden. Especially if it’s hidden.”

“I’m not lying,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Listening is a trick,” he said. “Listening is how you make yourself feel good while staying vague. Vagueness is how cages win.”

The rain started softly, like the world leaning in. I leaned on the railing and looked down at the dark water. The water didn’t care about my intentions. It just moved.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“Proof,” he said. “A plan. A system. An explanation that holds up when it rains.”

I laughed. Not because I was mocking him, but because the timing was perfect. The weather arriving right on cue, like a joke.

“Your weather doesn’t care about proof,” he said. “It just happens. That’s the problem.”

And then I saw it: he wasn’t here to stop travelers. He was here to stop delusion. He told me about all the other Fools. The ones who speak in light and mean compliance. The ones who say “unity” and mean “agree with me.” The ones who want to heal the world but only if it heals into their image.n Something in me prickled. Thorn or truth. I couldn’t tell.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I want to do something that matters.”

“And you should,” he said. “But your wanting doesn’t make you harmless.”

The rain thickened. The bridge creaked. The river kept moving like it had a job and the job was not to comfort me. I opened my notebook. The pages were empty. So empty they looked like a dare.

“I brought this,” I said, “because I’m tired of talking in circles in my own head.”

He snorted.

“A blank book. Classic Fool.”

“It’s not blank,” I said. “It’s unclaimed.”

“Same thing,” he said.

I turned it over. The second cover was darker. Marked where the first was bare. The Troll’s eyes narrowed like he didn’t want to be curious.

“What is that?” he asked.

“A way of reading,” I said. “A way of admitting that how you enter a story changes what you think it means.”

He stepped onto the bridge, not to attack, but to test. To see if I was selling him hope dressed up as wisdom. I held the notebook between us, exactly in the middle.

“Start from my side,” I said. “You’ll get wonder and risk and that stupid hope I can’t quite kill.”

“And if I start from mine?”

“Then you’ll get suspicion,” I said. “Pattern-recognition. The part of you that refuses cheap comfort.”

He touched the dark cover with a tenderness he’d deny in daylight. “People use hope to avoid responsibility,” he said.

“And people use skepticism to avoid vulnerability,” I said.

He looked up sharply. I shrugged. “I can do it too.”

The rain threaded between us like punctuation.

“Fine,” he said. “We read.”

We sat down on the bridge, ridiculous, wet, blocking the path for any reasonable person. We opened the notebook from my side first. The words that arrived weren’t instructions. They were mirrors. They didn’t say “choose light.” They said “notice what you call light.” They didn’t say “fight darkness.” They said “bring it closer until it can be seen.” We read until the middle, where the pages grew strangely still, like the book itself was holding its breath.

Then we flipped it and read from his side.

Those words didn’t destroy mine. They sharpened them. They named blind spots. They refused to let beauty become a hiding place. They refused to let anger become a religion.

Halfway through, I whispered, “This part hurts.”

“Good,” he said very quietly and I believed him.

When we finished, the rain had stopped. The river looked the same. The world hadn’t been fixed. But something had shifted in the air, subtle as a compass correcting itself. He stood first.

“So,” he said. “What now?”

I closed the notebook and held it to my chest like a small animal.

“Now we walk,” I said. “But not alone. Not on only one side of the bridge.”

He considered it like an uncomfortable equation. Finally he nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “But if you turn unity into a costume, I will tear it.”

“And if you turn truth into a weapon,” I said, “I will take it from your hand.”

We crossed the bridge together. And the bridge, which had been built to divide two shores, did what bridges are meant to do:

It held.

✶ What are you ready to begin badly?

✶ Where have you mistaken control for safety?

✶ What truth would you reach if you stopped performing certainty?