Pixels.

Play the game.
Press the plastic buttons.
The screen tells us
a car moves.
It accelerates.
Brakes.
Turns into a corner.

We believe—
because it works.

We crash,
and drive again.

We know better.

The car is not a car.
No engine. No heat. No risk.
Light arranged—
color beside color
until motion appears.

Pixels:
obedient, lifeless, convincing.

The designer decides
what red means,
what speed looks like,
how collision is punished,
how victory feels.

Meaning exists,
but only by agreement.

Then I step outside.

A door opens.
Metal yields.
I adjust the seat,
lower the temperature,
set the music
just loud enough.

My wife laughs.
A child tells a story
that wanders before it arrives.
We drive.

Steel, plastic, leather, glass—
nothing more, I’m told,
than molecules arranged.

The road is molecules.
The engine.
The food waiting for us,
seasoned and burned.

All of this is true.

But not all that is.

No one has ever said
“I love you”
to a pixel
and meant it.

No pixel has waited in fear.
No arrangement of matter
has known the weight
of another’s presence
or the terror of its absence.

Reduction explains the parts
and calls the whole excess.

A game ends.
The screen goes dark.
Nothing mourns.

We end,
and something tears.

God did not only arrange the pieces.
He spoke.
He breathed.

Not screen images,
but sons and daughters—
seen and named.

We are not simulations
running until power fails.
Not pixels
mistaken for meaning.

We are alive.

And that life
is not an illusion.