Doorway to Something I Can’t Remember
The past? A faded photograph. Faces blurred, edges softened by the relentless erosion of time. I see the doorway – but the room beyond? Hidden. Lost in the fog of forgetting. A ghost in the ruins of my own history.
The present? A dimly lit stage cluttered with yesterday's regrets and tomorrow's anxieties. We move through the motions – work, consume, sleep, repeat. Cogs in a machine we don't understand, serving a purpose we can't fathom. Faces around me? Masks. Smiles strained, eyes hollow. Actors reciting lines from a script we never wrote.
The future? A void. An abyss. We cling to our plans, our dreams – pathetic. The future is a raging torrent; we are leaves caught in its current. Meaningless. And yet, we persist in our illusions. Why? Fear of the alternative – facing the abyss.
This is the human condition: adrift in a sea of uncertainty, clinging to the wreckage of the past, haunted by the spectre of the future, lost in the maze of the present. We search for meaning – a futile quest.
Born into absurdity, we live in it, die in it. No escape, no transcendence. Just the endless cycle of existence, the ceaseless repetition of birth, decay, and death.
But we persist. We cling to the illusion of control, the myth of progress, the delusion of happiness. Building sandcastles on the shores of eternity, knowing the tide will wash them away. Addicted to hope? A crutch for the weak-minded? Or the last bastion of sanity in a mad world?
We crave connection – a desperate need to bridge the chasm of our isolation. But connection is an illusion, a fleeting moment of shared delusion. We are alone, trapped in the prison of our own consciousness. Our thoughts, our feelings, our experiences – forever locked within the confines of our own minds.
And what of truth? An elusive phantom, a shimmering mirage in the desert of our ignorance. We chase it relentlessly, but it always remains just out of reach. Is there any objective truth, or is it merely a construct, a convenient fiction we create to make sense of the chaos?
Perhaps the only truth is that there is no truth. Perhaps the only certainty is uncertainty. Perhaps the only meaning is meaninglessness.
A bleak outlook? Certainly. But honesty is rarely comforting. We are, after all, just highly evolved apes, clinging to a rock hurtling through space. Our existence is a cosmic accident, a fleeting anomaly in the grand scheme of things.
And yet, we strive, we yearn, we dream. We build civilizations, create art, explore the universe. Why? Is it simply a biological imperative, a desperate attempt to leave our mark on the world before we are extinguished? Or is there something more, some deeper meaning that eludes our grasp?
I don't have the answers. I only have questions.
Questions that gnaw at my soul, questions that keep me awake at night, questions that whisper in the wind and echo in the silence.
Questions without answers.
Questions that define the human condition.