Right in Two

I was driving one night, one of those long, half-awake drives where the world feels suspended between breaths. The sky was that bruised shade of twilight, the kind that makes the streetlights hum like they’re keeping secrets. I wasn’t looking for meaning. I wasn’t looking for anything, really. But meaning has a bad habit of finding you when you’ve got nothing left to offer it.

The radio had been off for months. I’d stopped listening, too many voices, too many opinions dressed up as prophecy. But that night I flicked it on, and Tool’s “Right in Two” came through like scripture leaking from a broken speaker.

Angels watching us, baffled. Light made flesh, tearing itself apart for the illusion of ownership. It felt less like a song and more like a diagnosis.

I remember thinking: we’re the only species that can hold light in our hands and still prefer the dark.

We call it progress, but it’s just illumination without wisdom. Technology without truth. Connection without communion. The angels must look down and wonder how something so divine can be so divided, how beings made of starlight can spend their entire existence trying to outshine each other.

I used to think darkness was the enemy. That it was the thing I had to fight, burn away, outgrow. But the older I get, the more I realize, darkness isn’t the villain. It’s the teacher. It’s the quiet where light learns its purpose. You can’t appreciate warmth until you’ve frozen. You can’t recognize truth until you’ve been seduced by the lie. Hell itself might just be the classroom where you finally understand what heaven actually means.

And I went through mine, the kind of hell that strips you down to raw nerve and bone, where every breath feels like a confession. When you’ve been through that, you don’t need sermons about sin or salvation. You already met both. They sat beside your bed and argued about who gets to keep you. And when you wake up from that kind of fire, you stop mistaking light for good and dark for evil. You realize they’re not enemies, they’re dance partners. They’ve been trying to find balance since the first spark split the void.

That’s what “Right in Two” made me see, not just the chaos in the world, but the war inside of me. Every thought, every desire, every moment of compassion wrestling with the urge to destroy. The angels weren’t mocking us. They were mourning us, watching light punch itself out because it couldn’t stand its own reflection.

The line “Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground” stopped being about war. It became a mirror. We do it every day. We kill the light in each other for being different shades of the same divine flame. We hoard, we divide, we name things mine and call it purpose. But the truth is, the more you cling to the light, the less of it you can hold. The trick is to stand in the middle, to let both sides breathe through you without letting either consume you.

Unplugging from the noise helped me remember that. When I stepped away from the endless scroll, the filtered perfection, the outrage economy, the dopamine masquerading as connection I realized how addicted I’d become to artificial light. The kind that glows but doesn’t warm. It took silence to remember the difference. It took boredom to remember who I was when no one was watching.

Now, when I draw, write, or walk under the night sky, I think about those angels again, not as distant beings, but as witnesses to our constant balancing act. Maybe they don’t envy us. Maybe they pity us. Or maybe they understand that creation itself needs chaos. That every fracture is another doorway for the light to get through.

We keep splitting the world right in two, heaven and hell, right and wrong, light and dark, as if they were ever meant to be separate. Maybe the point was never to choose a side. Maybe the point was to learn how to hold both without losing ourselves.

That’s what I’ve been doing lately, holding both. The light that blinds and the dark that heals. The silence that soothes and the noise that tests me.

I don’t need to be all light anymore. I just need to be whole.

Maybe that’s what the angels saw in us all along, not a tragedy, but a possibility. A species that could take the fire of heaven and the shadow of hell and build something sacred in between.

Maybe that’s what it means to be human.

To live split right in two…

and still choose to love the light that leaks through the cracks.