Carthaginian Peace

Is the ground beneath my feet slipping away? Or is it only in imagination that the sky turns ominous and frightening, with wind spewing fire like mythical creatures? This can happen to anyone, anytime.

A few weeks into spring 2025, I woke up and immediately realized I had committed a crime. Life’s absurd and chaotic nature was immediately apparent to every bone and cell in the body; It was as though waking up and being aware of the environment should have remained unacknowledged, something forbidden. In such moments, humans are beyond the help of convictions, faith, and devotion. These usual anchors of consolation evaporate like steam in dire situations. At those moments, more than anything, we want to collect the broken pieces of ourselves.

The turmoil may dent our zeal, but the fierce drive of living persists. In calmer circumstances, every waking moment feels entangled in a counting cycle—whether with a clock, calendar, chart, or benchmark! Because we want to lasso the intensity of sudden changes and the anomalies that defy logic into a manageable grip. Although counting provides an illusion of control and safety, this is a deceptive facade, and reality undermines any reassurance. Even the most comforting things or situations are temporary, and the feeling of ease they provide inevitably wanes. In exchange for our ability to count, to think critically, and make favorable predictions, we settled with the Carthaginian Peace, despite its unfavorable terms.

There was never a guarantee, yet we expected otherwise, that the numbers were immune to exploitation. When numbers lose their importance from abuse, we become not callous but benumbed. It is challenging to notice when a simple arithmetic operation turns into a gibberish mound, as if ghosts are playing tricks on us! The counter, context, time, place, and purpose twist the number’s property and result in an unsympathetic response to the laws of the physical world. What has always been around us, but we pretend otherwise, is that life experiences are mostly unfathomable in consciousness! The illogical results from calculations are part of this fiasco.

In the ruin, our default posture tilts towards sleepwalking with a bowed head, lest the truth of our hearts gush out with a scream! The struggles with shame and lists of emotional deprivation trap us in paralysis. To remain functional, we avoid looking at each other and hide from the weighty restraints of inadequacy. All the while making anguished efforts during countless examinations and every moment of our lives. No mercy from agony! Signs of our struggle overflow on every crease of appearance. Anxieties and unnameable dreads hound us and turn us into wordless, inept zombies with skulls of mush at articulating the conversations within our hearts. If there had been anyone to care about listening, our situation would not have improved much.

Even cherished mementos can vanish without warning; no one receives any prelude to life’s unfolding events, only stumbling to the next episode. Everyone is constantly getting pushed out of the way, like the thrust of a “kafila,” or they have turned into drifting logs floating on a river, struggling to stay afloat. Everything can also become a mere penumbra only in remembrance, only in keepsakes.

Waking up in the morning is a fault of being alive! How can we move on and continue our lives without spur-of-the-moment, fragile logic? We plan for the beat: inhale, exhale, and repeat the cycle until the dance stops! Endurance from our false sense of security eventually fails, considering everything around us. Our mind and body, too, collapse from the weight of breathing. Still, the demise, the certainty that awaits us all, is the last possibility we consider!