Consequences of Belief

I may have reached the point where it has become difficult to capture the feeling of experiencing things for the first time. At the age of 27, I am feeling a kind of unfamiliar loneliness, to say that it might be possible that I am carrying a type of solitude that grows bigger than what I can handle.

I grew up with solitude like a childhood friend—something that always stays unchanged, reminding me of what it once was to feel I belong in a home, the bringer of welcomed nostalgia, but has become someone who I drifted away from as I became an adult. Its tenderness slowly becoming a memory. Quick catch-up conversations start to feel like small talks that do not amount to anything. My relationship to solitude exists at a safe distance between fear and my newfound belief.

Now this heavy feeling is something I recognize that was birthed by self-neglect. I can feel it loom over me the more I age, as if this solitude is an invisible companion I had been nurturing throughout my life and only now did I have the ability to see it—once this loneliness has grown beyond me.

The city has become an amalgamation of memories of old lovers. Old pathways already marked by our fingerprints, the alleys mapped by our mind, and all those same roads we walk on every day, which upon sight, become submerged with the ordinariness of familiarity. What I am trying to say is I’m still looking for a poem in everything, a god in every gesture of speech. Some things stay the same but rot away with time.

This is the time when I can feel the time slowly etching itself onto my skin. I can feel youth being transferred from me to the younger generation, making this unresolvable conflict of aging known to me. I become aware that I am slowly losing my steam with the rush of unrecognized novelty passing through me like a new form of language I am too old to comprehend.

New experiences start to become an index of a similar encounter from the distant past. Every form of novelty carries an echo of a forgotten memory. Living starts to feel like a bittersweet walk through a gallery of the things that resembles objects that I should know, but don’t. I feel like I am forbidden to understand, where I am only an onlooker from the other side of this tempered glass. At the moment of trying to understand, the sudden realization comes in: I am back inside my own shell.

Doubt sets in. Always coming unannounced but always when I need it the most. It becomes this self-sustaining system that keeps my sanity in check.

In understanding the world, it has become a prerequisite to understand what I am trying to tell myself by my own actions and thoughts. The world becomes a perfunctory object that would rely on the interpretation of my immediate self. In so doing, I start to question the position of the voice that I am currently using at this moment. I become my own omniscient observer who speaks in first person, communicating with my self who is at the forefront of experiencing the world.

This shift from one “I” to another is difficult to catch in writing. And in reality, I know that my mind is giving birth to separate consciousness with their own function to preserve itself. Fictions after fictions become entangled into a fortress of vines—a forest of thought canopies with its own ecosystem of faith and a graveyard of beliefs.

In this game, I would let you participate in this space where there is no judgment.