In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
That’s the version I grew up with. Short, final, declarative. Not really up for debate.
But some scholars say that first verse might read differently. Something closer to when God began to create the heavens and the earth… That small shift changes the rhythm, no? It turns certainty into motion and makes creation feel like an ongoing act instead of something finished.
I don’t read the Bible as sacred anymore, but I still pause over how it was written. That first line feels less like a divine command and more like a beginning that keeps unfolding. Someone, somewhere, tried to make sense of existence and began with a sentence. Every culture does the same. Every story starts as an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
It was that shift in perspective that pulled me deeper into fiction. I think stories show how we look for meaning, how we keep trying to explain ourselves to each other and to ourselves. A novel can hold the same old questions like purpose, hope, or morality, but it doesn’t have to pretend there’s only one answer. The books I read often say more about the world we’re trying to build than the one we already have.
Deconstruction, for me, is just another way of reading closely. It isn’t about tearing belief apart, but about noticing how it was built. It’s seeing the footnotes, the language, the choices that shaped what we call truth. Every story, sacred or not, carries its own asterisk.
What I want after the asterisk to hold is that same curiosity. I want to write about stories and belief, about language, the books that stay with me, and the small shifts that change how I see things.
Maybe the stories we tell don’t point beyond us at all.
Maybe they just trace who we’ve been and who we’re still becoming.