You cannot peer into your own subconscious. When you want to say something, when you feel ready to scream the words out loud – you suddenly understand that you can’t utter a single one. Or you do speak, but all your thoughts, which seemed like they could fill thousands of words, collapse into a couple of sentences. What follows is a terrible emptiness, a hollow ache in the soul. You feel smaller, lesser, and you choose silence – it seems like the more correct choice, the safer one. And so, when you find yourself at the edge of an abyss, you are more likely to fall than to call for help. Simply because silence has become your habit.
Your name blurs into separate letters, dissolving into some incomprehensible symbols. It no longer matters who you are, who you will be, or who you were – now you are nothing, a void, an eternity. Nothing else than a collection of atoms. Just a structure, a mechanism, a machine. Though you haven’t even reached the level of a machine, because every machine is built to perform some function, and you cannot even eat or wash yourself. How can you even call yourself a machine? Just a wretch, barely showing any signs of life.
Go on, close your eyes and try to dissolve into your imagination again. It’s better there, isn’t it? There, you are someone. It’s a new feeling for you, one you are not so familiar with in real life. But inside your head, you are somebody: a sister, a lover, an enemy, an ally, a God. You can be anyone at all, truly, and there’s nothing shameful in that – each of us, at some point, has escaped into our own imaginary world, imagining ourselves to be someone important. It’s just that you got carried away; went so far that you ended up in a noose. You walk in circles, turning around again and again only to look back, to find yourself staring at yourself staring at yourself staring back. An abyss, empty words, limitation. The dead end.
When you try to become someone in reality, you forget who you are at all. A person? An entity? A temple? A hollow thing, mimicking what it sees and hears. But don’t worry, no one will judge you for that role in life. After all, it isn’t your fault. You never wanted this to be this way, right?
You put down your cold fingers onto your knees and notice the difference in temperature. Your body doesn’t seem to be coping at all. Running your fingers gently over your skin, you wonder whether you are alive or not. What if you’re not? What if you really a nonentity, an illusion, a lie? You smile and shake your head: “No, definitely not, I’m breathing, so I must be alive”. You slowly rise to your feet. Your body feels impossibly heavy, as if it doesn’t belong to you. Your gaze is lowered, and you see your own legs. You stand awkwardly, as if you don’t even know how to do that. But there’s no time for these thoughts right now, and so you take one step, then another, gradually returning to reality. Your body still feels heavy, but your legs move with more confidence. When you go out into society, you will walk lightly, as if you weigh as little as a feather. Running into someone you know, you will smile – so easily, so warmly. This has always been your truth. Nothing is more correct than a lie. And the lie became your idol; it whittled you like a wooden figurine, and helped you secure the right to be loved.
Your story will amount to nothing. No, it won’t even “become” nothing, because history will simply not remember you. And even if it does, people will twist your whole life the way they have twisted the stories of so many who lived before us, before the twenty-first century. You know that a certain writer was gloomy and grave, wrote of nothing but sorrow; but what if they was actually a joyful soul who loved deeply, and that was precisely why they, too, fell into a pit of despair?
And there is one truth, a very foolish and awkward one: everything exists “now”, in this moment. And this “ now” drives you mad, makes you look around and realize that every second already past is no longer “now”, and every future second isn’t it either. And so the question arises: what even is this ridiculous “now”? It is like Schrödinger’s cat – neither alive nor dead, just in the context of time.
“Who cares anyways”, – you think, walking quickly down the street. Passing people, you find yourself wondering about their lives. What if they too don’t know what they’re doing in society; don’t understand how they ended up among all-consuming parasites? What if they are the parasites? One way or another, every person is doomed to become a parasite from birth – that is simply the truth of human existence. All our lives are insignificant, just foolish echoes of stars. Their silent cry echoed across the cosmos and landed on Earth, creating life. Oh, no, that’s too much. After all, nobody likes scattered thoughts that seem meaningless, right?
You bite your lip until it bleeds. Your mother used to scold you for this habit long ago, but you can do nothing about it – again and again biting the skin with your sharp teeth, tearing it away, sometimes making it bleed. And once the blood comes, once you can feel raw flesh, you bite more and more – a peculiar kind of punishment. Or hunger. You barely eat anything, and so you bite your beautiful, tender lips. The taste of blood makes you want more. Since we’re on the subject of bad habits, the nails deserve a mention too – bitten down so far that you can’t scratch anything with them. Nails that people often called beautiful have become a ruin, shredded scraps of keratin, with little wounds all around. Tearing off the sides of your nails, the bits closest to the edges, turns out not to have been a very good idea. Not that it matters to me.
And so here I am, among people. What do they expect from me? Or rather, who can I be? What am I supposed to do, how am I supposed to behave? To be honest, I never understood this. I never had any sense of what my “obligations” were, so I simply decided to imitate others. It should be said that even in imitation, I had no particular success: people remained uninterested in me, and I remained uninterested in people. But you know, it would have been nice to know that people think of me at least neutrally – that would be enough for my endlessly anxious mind, which so often tormented itself with the fear that my mistakes would be remembered, that I would be mocked, that I would see those smirks again, hear the mockery aimed at me. I was a frightened child and I have remained a frightened adult. It’s just now I don’t care, or at least I try to convince myself of that, performing a confident face for everyone around me, as if I know what I’m talking about.
By my age, and I am still nothing but a foolish teenager, I have gotten good at making people smile. If in childhood I was awkward and constantly shy, now I have made that my weapon: I make people laugh, and I take pleasure in the smiles of those close to me or simply those I know. It is wonderfully delightful when you are loved. The only thing I am truly concerned about is that people remember me fondly and love me. I ran after this so hard that I scraped my legs bloody. Was it worth it? No, oh no, it wasn’t. Though I would be glad if in one moment everything changed, and I had people again whom I could entertain. Look at me: I’m laughing! I laugh, and my laughter may be nothing more than an empty shell, but I still offer it to you, wanting to make you smile. Laughter is love, in a way. Or I tell myself that. I don’t really trust myself at all – that is another thing I learned over the years. Or something I was taught: everyone was so uncertain of me, as if I were lying every time I opened my mouth. And I only ever told the truth – I never even lied to a doctor. But my mother would get angry when I told the truth. Every time, I couldn’t understand why she was so worked up about it, again and again. I never did figure it out, and even now it remains a mystery to me. So “now” I am made of nothing but lies. A mirage, a concept, a mistake. Call me what you want – honestly, how you address me doesn’t concern me much anymore. With time, that drifted into the background along with other concerns. I’ve pushed everything into the background, really. I simply understood that if you want to be loved – lie. Lies are love, in their own way. And laughter and lies often go hand in hand, especially with jesters like me. Tell one more lie to make others laugh – that is my love language. Though I never expect anyone to try to make me laugh in return. That is my role. I am the one who will love you, and I ask for nothing in return. I don’t ask… I simply know that you love me anyway. Don’t you?
After a day among people, all you want is to lock yourself in your room and sleep. Forever. People are exhausting, and this endless mask that I wear and never ever take off is such a pain. That’s just one of the things you do to squeeze yourself into the shape of society requires, so you become like everyone else. At first it feels dirty, as if you’re doing something criminal, but then you smile so easily and hold conversations about nothing so skillfully, as if it is a talent you were born with. As long as they’re laughing. I need nothing more. Just laugh, I’m begging you.
Alone with your thoughts, you find no peace. You feel the cold again and cannot get warm – that is just your body. It was always like this: weak, pitiful, crooked. It functions incorrectly, but I have no desire to change that, because it’s working and that’s enough. I am not God, expected to bring salvation, am I? At least, saving myself is not something I intend to do. But others! Others will not only be saved by me, but they also will remain my friends. As for those who don’t need saving, I won’t try to hold them – they cannot depend on me and give me the love I pretend I don’t need. It’s all so tangled and unpleasant, that it feels like trying to untangle a dusty ball of yarn in order to knit something useful. Except you have no desire to untangle it, and the yarn is already so old and so torn it would be simpler to throw it away and buy a new one. But you don’t go out to buy new yarn, and you don’t throw away the old. You leave it lying there, gathering more dust, because it’s all you know. Running away. If you run from home and attach yourself to someone you can make laugh, then even that ball of yarn stops being a problem. Nothing will be a problem at all. Because you are laughing, and the people around you are laughing, and so everything is fine. A simple truth. It’s a shame that in practice everything works completely differently. A great shame. And you understand this precisely when alone, because there is no longer anyone you need to perform for. Now you are with yourself. Now you are afraid. The fear of loneliness that torments you from within, appearing as a terrible, ragged shadow. Ragged like your nails, like your lips. You smile only in order to run away. So where is your courage now, hero? A hero with a fake sword, with no princess, and an enemy that is only yourself.
And by the way, I think I’m holding up quite well: I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs. I am a clean person, all in all. Not without sin, of course, but all of us are sinful, aren’t we? As I said, all people are parasites from birth, and parasites mean greed. One sin already to the name of every person. And my opinion is not in the least cynical – look around and you’ll see that I am right. I am always right, though perhaps I’m occasionally wrong. I prefer to think of myself as a fairly clear-headed person who sees the picture more deeply than most. And so I do, but there is no joy in it. When you understand that life has no purpose, that your existence literally carries not a drop of meaning, it is easy to break. You fall on your knees, lie down on the cold floor, stare at the ceiling with empty eyes, and simply cannot understand how to move further. The weight of the realization that the universe is far larger than your boundless mind settles on you like a stone, and you just… Collapse. The house of cards falls. No one wants to reassemble it – who cares to sort through something that has nothing to do with them? A remarkable quality of people, really. I could never understand how someone can abandon a person close to them, or how people can be so cruel to animals. In practice, people simply don’t perceive other beings as equal to themselves – they see only their own “I”. So silly, honestly. People are fools, and I cannot stand them. I may be a people pleaser, but even I don’t stoop to being that pathetic. And people are not bothered by it at all, as if that is their truth. Honestly, it makes me sick – the realization that I am here, among parasites, obligated again and again to go out into society and smile, as if I’m not thinking about putting an end to all of this. A smile is a sign that everything is fine. And if I’m smiling, then everything is fine. Another truth of mine.
So many thoughts swirl in the mind, pouring out in different colors, blending together and creating shades that even human eyes cannot see, that do not exist. And no matter how much you speak, it will come to nothing – because you are nothing. You are nobody. A silence, a shadow, a burden. Really, why bother saying anything at all?
Let’s just keep smiling, shall we?