Each rebirth leaves a quiet ember in its wake.
As we age, hair falls and returns—until, one day, it simply does not. Skin renews itself silently, like a hidden clock. Nails rise from their beds as if unwilling to yield to time. Even taste—our most fleeting sense—reinvents itself every ten days, restless for something new. Only the spine lingers, stubborn and still, guarding the echo of who we once were.
In seven years, nearly every cell within us is reborn. A few ancient ones remain, yet we emerge almost entirely new, wearing traces of our former selves. And still, paradoxically, we are older—never quite new. Reborn, but not rejuvenated. We live among remnants, pretending to begin again. The illusion of renewal fades when we realize each resurrection borrows from its own ashes. There are no blank canvases, no true do-overs—only continuations written in different ink.
With so much change in every moment, one might expect, after decades of breath, to have mastered transformation. Yet we resist it—with silence, with stories, with practiced forgetting. We hush the mind, inventing fictions to survive the rupture of change. Soon, we drift like herds, mistaking motion for direction. We build walls of gentle lies and soft fog, shielding ourselves as if erosion could not reach us. We stack illusions like bricks, claiming strength where only fear resides—the fear of facing what cannot be avoided. Amid the absurd theater of existence, our fictions become our lifeboats.
In the end, every deceit is devotion in disguise—a refusal to part with the one companion who endures through every change and rebirth: the soul, faithful still yet hungry for truth. But even devotion, left too long in darkness, forgets what it was meant to keep alive. And in the silence that follows, we become both mourner and mourned.
Making of :
Every deceit is devotion in disguise
“Every deceit is devotion in disguise” means that many of the ways we lie—to ourselves or to others—are rooted in attachment, fear of loss, or a desperate wish to protect something precious, not pure malice.
That “one companion who endures… the soul” suggests that what we are secretly protecting with our deceit is our own inner self, the enduring sense of “I” that survives every change, failure, and reinvention.
The soul as faithful yet hungry
The soul is “faithful still yet hungry for truth,” which means that even as we protect ourselves with illusions, there remains a deeper part of us that longs to face reality and live honestly.
This creates tension: deceit tries to shield the soul from pain, while the same soul aches for genuine truth, so devotion becomes both caring and suffocating at once.
Devotion left in darkness
“Even devotion, left too long in darkness, forgets what it was meant to keep alive” means that protective love, if it stays too long in denial or avoidance, stops serving its original purpose and begins to harm what it wanted to save.
The image of “darkness” evokes ignorance, repression, or unspoken pain, where care without light or honesty slowly kills the very vitality it was trying to guard.
Mourner and mourned
Emotionally, it suggests a quiet, existential tragedy: by clinging to comforting untruths, we end up attending our own funeral from the inside, aware that something essential in us has died even as we continue to live.
“We become both mourner and mourned” captures an inner collapse: the self that is lost and the self that grieves that loss are the same person.