Picture this.

I needed someone who could lift a coffin without spraining a wrist, someone who understood the blunt logistics of death — earth, wood, weight, silence. I asked my boss to send me that person.

What I got instead was a PhD in Psychology: twenty-something, sun-warmed skin the color of late August, a manicure that had never met soil, and the calm, padded voice of someone trained to ask, “How does that make you feel?” while the shovel lay untouched.

Her name was Noelle. Lovely girl. Barely old enough to know almost nothing.
And there we were — standing in the shadow of the inevitable — trying to figure out how to bury my parents, and drifting, somehow, into a conversation about soul and love.
The kind of talk that starts politely and ends like a knife fight in an alley.

I was trying to make her understand what mattered: I wasn’t returning to the earth just two people, but a hymn to love — one of the rare ones that didn’t sound like cheap stationery from a gift shop. Lives engraved into each other. The kind of love that doesn’t burn in all directions, but follows a single luminous trajectory — fixed, unwavering, perfected in its clarity.

My mother was born to be the visible extension of my father, his exponential function. Every quality she possessed — and every flaw — was in direct proportion to that defining role.

“The gods have allowed that from two we may once again become one,
thus bringing healing to the human condition.”

She was proof that Aristophanes’ Myth is not just a metaphor, that Brâncuși’s The Kiss is not just stone. There are loves that dissolve two people into something else entirely — into perfection and into tragedy. Into a constant as fundamental to the cosmos as light or gravity.

“Listen… listen…
There are pairs without death,
forever in motion,
resembling a metaphor, resembling an idea.
They remain together / in a kiss, as in a sweet storm.”

The stability of the universe is not upheld only by the speed of light, the gravitational constant, or Avogadro’s number. It also depends on the rare few who can turn the relentlessness of time into permanence and devotion, who can find stillness in the heart of entropy. Through their improbable alliance, my parents had become one of those constants — the kind you won’t find in any textbook, but without which the universe would quietly fall apart.

So I ask her — dead serious:
“Can you find a cemetery where we could bury this? A coffin that could contain every declaration of love ever made? A plot of ground woven from everything unearthly, guarded by roses tying heaven to earth? Can you do that?”

She didn’t even blink.
“A hymn in every love song, a cameo in every sonnet, and the lead suspect in every human tragedy… the soul’s been coasting on good PR for centuries. Mine? Less a divine spark, more a repeat offender.”

I frowned. “What?”

“If you want me to help you bury two people, I can do that. If you need more… I’m not your person.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe in great loves. Same way I don’t believe in the soul. The soul is just the sum of our weaknesses. That’s all it’s ever given me: flaws. Certainly not love. I remember it only when I need an alibi for my screw-ups.”

“The soul as a legal defense?” I asked.

She smirked like she’d been waiting for that.
“Exactly. The soul was humanity’s first scapegoat — the perfect patsy. Every time we fail, it’s there to take the fall. Anxiety. Depression. Fromm’s alienation. Durkheim’s anomie. Too much empathy, no empathy, envy. ‘Your Honor, Freud’s melancholia pulled the trigger — I was just holding the gun.’

Go further back and it’s the same: Aristotle’s akrasia, Pascal’s divertissement, Kierkegaard’s sickness-unto-death, Nietzsche’s ressentiment, Sartre’s nausea. You can dress it in any philosophy you want, but the plea bargain’s always identical: ‘It wasn’t me, it was my soul.’

Modern times just rebranded the racket. Maslach calls it burnout. Seligman calls it learned helplessness. Herman sells you trauma-bonding. Throw in impostor syndrome, decision fatigue, toxic positivity, dopamine addiction, screen-induced attention collapse — the TED Talk editions.

From the Stoics to Silicon Valley, the diagnosis changes, the hashtags change, the merch changes — but the excuse never does: ‘My soul is damaged goods, so what did you expect?’

And here’s the thing you won’t like: the second you admit to having a soul, you’ve made yourself prey. You’ve told the world you’re too soft, too earnest, too willing to speak in a language they stopped learning generations ago. They’ll clock you instantly: wrong choices, hesitation, self-doubt, confusion. Delicious.

Don’t imagine the soulless have it better. We just traded one predator for another. The world expects us to be razor-sharp, efficient, untouchable. Nobody asks for empathy; they reward its absence. The people they worship — whether they know it or not — are sociopaths: the penthouse set, the yacht class, the ones sipping champagne on private islands while we doomscroll their Instagram.

So yes — the mind is better paid than the heart. Which is why I keep my payroll clean. I don’t invest in the heart. I don’t budget for a soul.

Side effects? Sure. Too much mind rots whatever you’ve got left in there. And if we opened it up now, yours or mine, we’d see it’s already decomposing — not metaphorically. I mean visibly.”

I stared at her. Not because she was wrong — plenty of what she said had teeth — but because she’d mistaken cynicism for clarity.

“The Apocalypse According to Noelle,” I said finally, like I was naming a gospel that hadn’t made the final cut.

“Here’s what I think you’re missing: the soul does matter. It matters so much that, before the millennium takes its last bow, we’ll realize it’s the missing variable in the theory of everything. Without it, the leap from quantum physics to cosmic physics stays impossible.

Reality is a continuous tremor — a drunk poet slipping between metaphors. Those possibilities only collapse into the here-and-now when someone witnesses them. And only that fragile, inconvenient, dangerously exploitable thing called the soul can force the quantum stutter of being into the singular, irreversible fact of now.

So maybe it’s not a flaw. Maybe it’s not the scapegoat. Maybe it’s the only proof we were ever here. And if that’s true, then losing it to someone isn’t the tragedy we imagine — it’s the only proof we ever had one.”Would you marry me?

She didn’t argue. She just looked at me, the way you look at someone who’s either onto something… or hopelessly lost in it.

For a moment, we sat there — two people in the same conversation, staring at entirely different maps.

And I couldn’t tell which was worse: living as if the soul didn’t exist… or living as if it did.