Stultiloquy

When you’ve been avoiding it for a long time, there comes a time when you must force yourself to do the dreaded reconciliation. What have you been to others? How much have you given away or taken back? What have you accomplished? The lists of unfinished tasks might grab your attention instead. Anxiety ensues, and you squint at the shadows of undoneness at the fringes of your doing—oh, the haunting feeling of incompleteness! Even your triumphs may feel like jerry-build. A weighty sigh escapes with its full ferocity and uproots you to a higher plateau, where you faintly peek at the end of your journey; your bones feel the end beginning. You become desperate to start over but concede the most challenging part: not just the work of changing to a better self but also of unbinding everything you already knew about how you knew yourself. You feel the enormity of your concept; you let it sync in; you allow yourself to recollect. You must, however, wait to answer your inquiry since the exact ending still needs to be determined. You linger, and you delicately nurse your idea—that you can undoubtedly better yourself.

Time gives you a sly leer; it can only carry you towards decadence; instead of creating coherence, the wave of time tosses you into pandemonium. There is neither permanent bliss nor perfection while your breathing continues. Even the clock’s speed changes—the older you get, the more the ticks accelerate. The beginning of your voyage was full of lures that blinded you enough to plunge into a dead end, and you found nowhere to turn. When you realize this, you also discover that, regardless of the outcome, you are always responsible. Your days and hours become nothing but a struggle for upkeep and budgeting. To make things worse, life costs money; the longer you are alive, the more it will cost you to continue. While you tidy up one end of your life, you invariably make a snarl somewhere else. So, the only goal should not be betterment but rather the sustenance of the soul.