We Don't Ask Enough Why's. Why?

A note on why we need to question folks like 4-year-olds

When did we stop asking why, really asking it, not the polite version that waits its turn and accepts whatever comes back, but the kind that tugs at shorts, shirts, and drawls, and interrupts dinner and refuses to be put to bed, because now the only people who seem to ask why with any real hunger are children and we call them annoying, we shush them, we sand the edges off their curiosity until it fits inside something manageable, something adult, and meanwhile we scroll past whole lives and loud opinions and never once lean in close enough to ask what sits underneath them, like that man on your feed who posts about trans women every week, the same sermon dressed in slightly different clothes, his comment section a tidy amen corner, and you know, you just know, he’s a couple dozen whys away from something softer and more complicated, maybe lust, maybe envy, maybe a trembling recognition of a freedom he won’t allow himself to touch, or the woman who writes long threads about “work ethic” and “kids these days” while quietly unraveling in a job she hates, and you can feel it, if you keep asking why, that it’s less about discipline and more about grief for the life she thought she’d have by now, or the friend who can’t stop posting gym selfies and protein counts and transformation photos, who says it’s about health, always health, but keep going, keep asking, and you might land somewhere closer to control, to fear, to wanting to be held in a body that finally feels like it belongs to him, or the couple who flood the timeline with anniversary tributes so ornate they read like eulogies, and you wonder what silence they’re trying to outtalk, what question they’re afraid to ask each other when the lights are off, and why we don’t follow these threads all the way down, why we stop at the first answer like it’s enough, like it satisfies anything at all, when the truth is the answers we need are probably just thirty-four whys away, maybe fewer if we’re brave, maybe more if we’ve been quiet too long, and what would happen if we let ourselves be four years old again with it, stubborn and unembarrassed, asking why with our whole chest, asking why until the answer catches somewhere deep in your daddy’s throat, until it scrapes on the way out and comes back changed, until it tells the truth or something close to it, because there is something waiting on the other side of all those questions, something we keep circling but never quite touch, and it might not be neat or kind or even useful at first, but it will be real, and real is better than whatever this quiet acceptance has been pretending to give us.

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