What is meant by self, if it is not the delicate balance between what one really is and who one wants to be? An endless dialogue between desire and silence, memory and restraint.
Sometimes, I feel like I have spent my whole life living but hardly ever existed. Was there an actual me or just a reflection of something missing deeply—perhaps an actor on a stage I never tried out for, reciting lines that were never mine?
I often imagine myself as a museum of lost beginnings. A hall filled with “almosts”—almost loved, almost known, almost saved. It’s a quiet tragedy to carry such vivid interiors while the world forces you to stay outwardly hollow.
And so I walk. Breathe. Eat and sleep when appropriate. But it isn’t living that fills me up – it’s pretending to live that does so instead. Practised at seeming alive, I am afraid I have forgotten how to do so. Every gesture and word practised over time – empty – caked in the dust from making appearances.
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, there is a scream inside me. But before I can throw it away like a stone into the sea of truth, the world comes barging in with its alarms and duties. Who do we shout at if we suspect that God, too, may be silently crying in some far corner of the universe?
I suppose it should be a joy for me to consider myself as one who has built himself up from nothing. Is that not what survival is? To move on despite having no purpose? To stitch oneself together, pain and memory perhaps? Yet what shall we name this—this-this act of resistance? Is it resilience or simply an inability to die when you ought to?
There are forms of dying that do not leave behind any corpse. No threnody. Just an attenuating presence, a gradual evaporation of spirit. At times, I think my most violent deaths occurred in absolute silence—over dining tables, through half-done goodbyes, undergirded by withheld affections and misapprehended looks.
Love is a funny thing. I can’t explain that well enough. When I was born, I wanted to give love and affection to everyone who seemed to understand me. But at the same time, it always felt like I was not worthy of receiving any form of love back due to my defective self. This meant that my hands were too clumsy, my presence was too heavy, and my desires were rather inconvenient.
Speaking in terms of restraint became my new language. In reality, there were times when all I longed for was being asked to stay, but instead walked away while saying “I’m okay”. Love became the ghost that haunts all my rooms. Even after refusing to show up at all, there are still altars built for it in my life.
Have you ever thought that your soul can be just a collection of all its disappointed dreams? Do we call this growth or rather an art of bearing unfortunate situations with dignity?
I go back to my past experiences not to relive them but to analyse the pain they caused me. I engage in conversations with people who don’t exist anymore, about things that never happened to me. Sometimes I feel like doing it, not because I miss those persons themselves, but because I miss the old me, before I learnt to suffer in silence.
I am no longer searching for understanding. It perhaps never existed. No one sees and feels life the way another person does. No two hearts beat together for long periods. In happiness or sorrow, we are finally alone as separate stars against the dark sky, praying nobody forgets us.
Nobody dares to ask me a question. I have accepted that no answer might ever be found for my questions.
Though I am still here.
I do not survive because there is any hope of redemption. I do not endure the expectation of meaning.
I keep on living simply because if I continue existing and refuse to vanish, I remain human and pathetic in the process.
Possibly that is how we find grace within this ridiculous theatre of existence.
If the soul is eternal, as some mystics claim, then so is heartbreak. And maybe that’s the price we pay for having loved like gods while still trapped in mortal skin.
In silence,
In truth,
In what remains after words fall away,
—Yours, in a thousand unburied ways.