My Tower of Babel

My Tower of Babel is a deeply personal narrative about two teenagers attempting to connect across an unbridgeable epistemic divide. The story follows a young man who finds strength in doubt, approaching the world through curiosity and questioning, and a young woman who finds strength in faith, deeply Christian, a pillar of the communities she’s apart of, and possessing a brilliant mind. They grew up together, make each other laugh harder than anyone, have helped one another at their lowest, lounge around, tease one another constantly, and inevitable get romantically and intellectually entangled. All is well until college, when the narrative starts, and when the boy embarks on a theological exploration, leading him to apologetics circles, prosperity gospel churches, and various faith communities, and ultimately realizes how deeply religious the young woman is. They attempt to navigate religion like any other topic in their relationship, him asking questions and her answering, but this feels… different. The story builds toward a final, fateful dialogue with the young woman that begins with his provocative assertion: “I feel like God's greatest crime against humanity was the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the elimination of a common tongue” and ends with “Fine, I guess I do think doubt is blasphemy— and you’re making me drift further and further from God”

The thematic core is about how we know, believe, and construct meaning, made tangible via the relationship between the two characters operating from irreconcilable systems of understanding as they attempt to truly see each other. The Tower of Babel becomes a metaphor not for intellectual disagreement but for emotional impossibility: the inability to communicate love across epistemic divides, and to transfer feeling through incompatible ontologies. Their frustration emerges from caring too much to stay silent, watching the people they love walk toward what they perceive as harm while being unable to make them see what they see. This is a story about people who love one another and cannot communicate that love in a way the other can receive, standing on opposite sides of rubble, shouting in languages the other cannot understand.