march 10, 2026

light as a feather, heavy as bricks

at the end of all meaning is where i begin. at the end of all thought there is a blankness to which my body arrives for the briefest moment, before receding, before scrunching, before collapsing, before returning, to some periphery. my mind is quicksands, quietly slipping into every place i do not want it to be, quietly taking from the moment everything i want to hold. i want to grasp nothing but the thingness of this moment, the experience of this sound inside my being, the existence of this shape inside this space, the weight of my flesh on where words cannot go. i am still tossing, against my will, or for it, between the practice of being and the habits of wanting. it is an addiction to be a human here, one of so many bodies flinging themselves from one place to the other, i don’t know where we are always going, where we are walking to and from, but it cannot be worth all this. i refuse to believe it. all this constant flinging – bodies passing bodies passing bodies passing things – we are always crossing paths, going somewhere, never quiet, never speaking. i wish i could blame my delirious observations on jetlag, but that has never plagued me, and i slept eight miraculous hours on the plane, so i have no excuse. i can always find a reason for something, these days. the internet ensures you always have an answer to things – something to blame. stupid robot will validate every theory i have, and that is partly comforting, and largely dangerous. i should not know so much, and i should not need to know so much, and i should not possess the illusion that i can know so much. i should not be in the business of constant knowing, or addicted to it, i should accustom myself, in fact, to not knowing more. i think that way i will far more easily slip back into my skin, this shell, this suit, this body, the floor, the sofa, the places, i am in. people walk so fast here, and they are so often alone. they are always walking places, always looking down, always looking slightly scrunched up and troubled and calculating and reaching. in tokyo people were often in groups of two and three. there was less of all this silent walking, and fewer women roaming in groups of one. in india there were probably zero too, but i didn’t notice such things at home. now that i think about it, they were always walking in the evening – not roaming to go, or see, but roaming to roam, to be. there was a code, an unspoken reason, for those evening walks, and it did not need to be said. there was so much written on people’s faces, and it was too often revealing, what their minds could not say. i love that we can sense people even when we are not aware we can. i like that our internal weather has some way of seeping out through our pores, saying what our mouths rarely do. i like that the unspoken air around a person is honest, because very little else in this world now is. i hate when i can pick up sadness in the envelope of someone’s skin, because it reminds me how much of it there is, and how easy it is to hide. i don’t know why i am writing anymore, or these days, because i am losing sight of all reasons for most action. i am doing it because i want to do it, and i don’t like to think beyond that anymore. i worry i am still imagining someone will read this some day, but i am trying to write anyway. i don’t know why i am still so haunted by the act of belonging to anyone’s imagination. not anyone – but anyone who i suppose i have declared incapable, or incongruent, of knowing at all. i forget that i exist inside an envelope too, and that people are not stupid, even when they lack the words. what else explains the miracle that occurs when someone entirely unassuming – someone entirely hopeless – suddenly regurgitates the exact right words? i wish i was deaf and unaware of all this entirely – i wish i could erase the part of my brain that was once white as chalk – the part that now observes what others think of it. it’s so entirely irrelevant, and i existed for so long in the smoky bliss of unawareness – in the smokeless land where i just was all i was, and it just was what it had to be. there was no thinking, no ego, no endless entanglement with questions of do they do they do they do they. they did not, or they did, but i did not have to know. my existence was outward, and i prefer it would return to such a state. it cannot though, this damned genie does not return to the bottle that has also released from it immense freedom and joy and truth.

i discovered in the car journey to the airport that almost everything here exists on one side of a coin. i.e. there are reasons for things being the way they are, there are functions to all disorder, there is survival in all disease. there is a reason i became so damn aware of my existence and all the angles it formed with others’ – the geometry helped me discover exactly who i was. there were reasons societies built on individualism were now decaying from the deepest absence of belonging. there were reasons that the act of liberation – of knowing and seeing and discovering the self – often gets muddled with the overidentification of the self and so with the pain it declares or discovers was inflicted upon it. there are reasons the process and privilege of self discovery is too often accompanied with the harshness of exclusion or the violence of isolation and all that is perceived as necessary to the act of self preservation. perceived. there is no right way of doing things, but there is often a method that emerges in some way as established or normalised or acceptable in a society. it is dangerous when that method is not rooted in any truth or moral doctrine – if such a thing at all exists – but instead a product of some pseudo-democratic agreement as determined by the laws of virality and entertainment and shared resonance. most scripture in such a world is a mirror, not a lens. it does not help you see more clearly as much as it reflects back to you what brings you comfort, what simply rings true. in such a society most things amplify the essence of things as they are, and do not distill at large some higher path or truth. the idea that something is ‘higher’ or of moral value is in itself diluted in a society that believes much of reality was constructed on destruction. if the way that most things were done in the past was so utterly incorrect and harmful, there is very little room left for any absolute truths to exist, or hold value. the generation that emerges as rebellious in its core nature – as existing in opposition to the way of life or way of being or way of seeing that existed before it – has no reason to believe things that simply state they should be believed. everything must ring true, everything must be interrogated, everything must fit neatly inside the castle that is now being constructed from scratch, that is being built on a narrative that all that came before it was somehow wrong. it is a worrying state of affairs, because it is built on self-aggrandizing and self-preservation and self-obsession and self-righteousness. there are reasons for this too, and there are chances it might not sustain, at least if there is some merit to the idea that humans need one another, or love. love, like death, is another circuit breaker. it will threaten, i hope, the foundations of a society that is being constructed on separation. equally, it will assert itself in societies that seek to preserve, above all, the facade of collective coherence that rests dominantly and unquestioningly on ties of obligation and roleplay. that is no good, too. love, i hope, will correct the excess of individualism and the excess of collectivism, or at least the extent to which those ideas have deviated from their core meaning, and began to caricature themselves. love will interfere, i hope, where we pursue the self at all costs, or the social vessel at all costs. humans will be reminded of their misery by their misery, and it is all a matter of whether they will pay it attention. misery is a product of lovelessness, and misery is loud. it is louder than the canker and volume and distraction at which modern society operates, and i’d like to think it cannot be muted. it probably can, which is why we have ended up here. but it is getting louder, at least in some pockets, and i hope, in my most deep and desperate hopes, that we will listen. i don’t know how societies evolve or improve, if such a concept at all exists, and whether such a change will occur through forces of ideology, or technology, or violence, or nothingness. i imagine there will be some spontaneous order that will emerge yet again, ideally un-hijacked by the disproportionate power wielded by money and capital. we will see, or we will die, and the outcome will rest on the strength of love – independent of us – and the strength of love – we cultivate within. i am not naive it will all go beautifully, but i am heartened by the fortitude and essence of love. it is a magical thing, and it is on its magical quality that i rest my whole faith.