UhVyn

I need to start by saying the orange is suspicious.

Not in a dramatic way. Just… in a “why are you sitting there like you know something” way. It’s too confident for a fruit. It’s round. It’s glossy. It’s pretending not to rot.

Anyway.

There was a stapler in a drawer once. The drawer had receipts from 2014 and a manual for a toaster that absolutely no one has read. The stapler believed deeply that it was a lighthouse. And honestly? I respect that delusion. Shoot for the ocean, champ.

But it wasn’t a lighthouse.

It was labeled.

The label said what it was.

No one read it.

That feels important.

Hold that thought. Don’t skim it. Eh, you already did.

Because this is the part where most people start scanning for meaning like it’s hiding in bold font somewhere. It’s not. It’s just… here. In the middle of the mess.

Say hi to the squirrel. There has to be a squirrel. It’s sitting on the counter next to the microwave holding a piece of paper that says “Instructions.” It is reading them. Slowly. With focus. With small squirrel diligence.

Behind it? Someone already microwaved something without checking the time settings. Sparks. Smoke. Mild regret.

The problem is most people perch.

They do this thing where they hover on the headline like pigeons on a statue. They don’t read the plaque. They don’t circle the monument. They just exist near it long enough to feel informed.

Perching feels like understanding.

It isn’t.

Skimming feels like reading.

It isn’t.

There’s this strange modern confidence where someone will read twelve words of a paragraph, decide what it “means,” and then argue with the rest of it as if it personally insulted their childhood pet. Meanwhile the actual point is sitting three sentences down, waiting patiently like the stapler, blinking.

And yes. That was a callback. You were supposed to notice that.

If you didn’t, that’s fine. This article forgives you. But it also kind of proves the point.

Reading comprehension isn’t a test.
It isn’t vocabulary.
It isn’t knowing the difference between “their” and “there” (although please, try).

It’s attention.

It’s staying long enough for the thread to connect.

It’s not assuming the orange is just an orange.

When you rush, your brain fills in blanks. It invents bridges where none exist. It deletes nuance because nuance takes time. It reacts to keywords. It harvests sentences like berries and leaves the forest thinking it saw the ecosystem.

It didn’t.

It saw fruit.

The stapler thought it was a lighthouse because nobody bothered to check what it actually was. That’s what happens when we skim people, ideas, articles, conversations. We mislabel them. Then we argue with our own mislabeling.

Which is wild, honestly.

If you made it here, not skimmed here, but actually read here, then you probably saw it. There was some sense. It was structured. The nonsense was deliberate. The thread was woven under the absurdity.

It just required you to slow down. Not to hand-wave with a joke or meme without actually trying. But to sit with it.

And that’s it.

That’s the whole point.

Read.
Read past the orange.

The squirrel did.

And the squirrel is doing fine.