28/09/2025 | Today: How It is to Be

I don't really know or understand how things are anymore. I feel like I'm floating in nothing or like I'm walking in a place that doesn't exist, I'm lost somewhere that isn't here, headed down a path that I can't see. Everyone around me, career this, graduate job this, I don’t know why I’m supposed to live and you’re telling me I’m not applying to enough jobs, that my CV isn’t good enough or that I don’t say the right things in an interview?

I live a nebulous life existing only in blips, a small presence on a groupchat, a faint like on an instagram story. There is a still quiet where happiness should rejoice, any jagged edges and pointed teeth have been filed down to nubs and yet I have the gall to wonder why I have no bite.

I am tired of having meaningless mini epiphanies that give only false hope. When it happens it feels like the world is opening around me, gravity pulls me towards the ground, and enlightenment is only a step away!

Only to be struck by a laziness, birthed from the womb of fear, and I degrade back to where I was, floating in nothing, somewhere that isn't here. No change is made and everything stays the same, only I know a little more, and I understand even less.

There is no call to action, only "one day" and "I wish", and one day I will be happy, and I wish I could be better.

07/10/2024 | Wishing for Extra Time

When I was younger, I would wish profusely upon any deity I could think of for a prolonged life.

First, I'd wish for myself, maybe to live to 200 or 300. I think even back then I knew a long life would get boring. After myself came my family, my mother, my father, and my brothers too.

But, what about my cousins? My half-siblings? What about my grandparents? What about my friends?

Fine... God, more life for everyone I like!

...

Nothing ever happened, but for a long time I subconsciously held the belief it had came true. I never said it, and nobody ever knew, but death seemed like an impossibility to me.

At some point I stopped believing. Maybe it was when I sprained my ankle and couldn't walk for a week? Or when I nearly got hit by that bus one early morning walking to school? Maybe it was when my aunt got cancer, and I had to slowly watch the life fade from the woman who used to cut fruits for me when I came to her house.

We weren't all that close, as a child she seemed strict, but as a teen she was always nice. When I first saw her since that diagnosis, it was sad, of course, but more than that, fear towered right over me. Like the glass dome that shielded my world shattered all at once, and now, laid bare and unprotected, death has entered my world. How frail she seemed, how in pain she was.

When she passed and there was an open casket, I didn't look upon her body. But from the corner of my eye, she looked so at peace.

How lucky I am that it took me that long, how unlucky I will be when it all comes to pass later.

Even this though, despite it all, was not when I stopped believing.

My mother had been nursing this headache for a few days now. As the days passed it progressively got worse. The day before, she went downstairs to the living room to sleep. On the couch, next to no one, with no light around her. When I can't sleep I go down there too. The ambient flowing of water from the fish tank next to the bare darkness soothes you.

At around 11 AM I woke up. I had somehow, managed to miss all the panic. When I awoke I was met with my brother telling me she was at the hospital.

"Oh."

I went upstairs to brush my teeth. I checked all the messages on my phone, even then I could not process it. Surely my mother couldn't die. I wished! Didn't I?

Next hours felt like a blur. Getting on with my day as normal, periodically checking my phones for updates. When it came around to night-time I felt, relieved, she's going to be fine. I'll see her tomorrow, and it'll be all good.

I had never seen my mother like that. Were her arms always that skinny? Look at all those bruises. The constant whirring of machines, the dry taste in my mouth. What is going on? What is happening?

All through this I didn't cry. Even though, I've cried for much less. How could I, when someone was watching me?

Death didn't just enter, he was here, right next to me. Watching, pensively.

I knew my mother wouldn't die, I don't know how, but I just knew, just as I know, that wish is now gone.

07/07/2024 | How It is to Dream

As a child, dreaming was as natural as breathing, dreams felt real because the future felt unreal. I used to dream I was an astronaut or an explorer, playing out adventures in space or voyages across the world.

Now, my dreams have changed in unrecognisable ways. I dream that I have direction, that I have purpose. As I've grown older my dreams have only grown more vague and conceptual in nature, and yet my understanding of my dreams then, is the same as my understanding of my dreams now. I could not, as a child, fathom what it means to be an astronaut beyond spaceships and aliens, or that people aren't really explorers anymore. As an young adult I can not fathom what it means to have purpose and how, anybody knows what they're doing in life, I for one am more lost than I have ever been. At least as a child my parents could do all the thinking for me, now of course I want to think for myself, but what is there to think? Where is there to go?

03/05/2024 | The Night Sky and The People Beneath It

Maybe it's embarrassing, but I never knew what stars were what in the night sky. The stars don't like us in London you see, we've done too much, so much so that they hardly shows their face anymore at night. Three stars, maybe four, but other than that, a blank space and a lonely moon loom over the London nightlife.

On a dark night, a thousand miles from home, we left our university accommodation and walked deep into the night, putting a long day behind us. A peaceful little village, far out in the countryside with a nostalgic smell of manure that by all means should be disgusting, but only brought fond memories of childhood visits to the motherland. No sooner had the front door shut when, out of coincidence, I looked up. Then, we all looked up. It was the night sky.

An uncharacteristic silence filled the space. You live your life day after day, sometimes you forget that there exists a world outside your confined space. We all stood there for a couple of seconds, in awe. Slowly, we started walking again, but we never quite stopped looking at the sky.

With only distant crickets and swaying leaves to muffle our boisterous laughter and talking, we wandered, looking for a lake a friend told us was nearby. Manoeuvring about in the dark, with only our phones to light where we step, trying to avoid the muddy patches, wet grasses and misplaced rocks. From what I could only surmount to extreme luck, after a couple dead-ends and wrong turns, we stumbled upon a path that had been nothing but grass, which as we walked, seemed to turn to dirt, then to gravel, and finally to rock. By then we realised where we had reached the lake.

We sat ourselves down by the rocks at the waterline and laid our heads down. I noticed a peculiar arrangement amongst the stars. It had seemed as if there were three stars aligned perfectly in a row.

"What is that?" I said while pointing.

"That's Orion's belt." He replied.

"Oh. So that's what it looks like."

We talked for a while but naturally our voices began to fade to a halt. Complete silence as our heads rested against the bare rock, no wind, no crickets, nothing, not a decibel to be heard. I swear for a moment, the moon and the stars shone brighter than ever before and the night sky looked as clear as day.

21/03/2024 | On The Path to Purpose

It was once known to me what I wanted to do. Now, nothing is known to me, except that I know nothing.

Days pass by, clouded in a misty haze, living each as they arrive. The realisation dawned upon me with a weight almost too heavy to bear. I am lost. Tomorrow, I usually know what I'm doing and within the next week I have a faint idea of my plans, but next month? The next 6 months? Next year? Ten years? Nothing.

As I grow older, the path that lays beneath me has slowly changed. Branching paths are blocked off and doors are slammed shut, meanders in this winding road become all the more straighter, the next step and the next, walking forward without comprehension, without passion, without purpose, in a straight, monotonous line.

I'm afraid of what's ahead of me, but I am too apathetic to move away. For better or for worse, I have resigned myself to continue walking down this path, only hoping, that the end is beautiful and that the journey will be worth it.