we were just echoes pretending to be something
Come to think of it, I don’t hate people. Even though mostly I do, millions of them are certainly difficult to like, but that’s just how the world works, right. It is not that I refuse to be part of the crowd, nor do I despise the laughter shared among friends.
I just don’t see the point of them. They come and go, fill the air with their noise, laughter, stories, but in the end, none of it matters.
Rather, it is just that I fear becoming dependent on it, on something so uncertain, so easily taken away.
The more you let them in, the more you depend on them, and the more it hurts when it’s all gone.
Because its always gone, they always leave. Even worse. It stays just long enough to remind you that you were better off alone.
You can’t hold on to them. You can’t make them stay. Or even if you could, what difference would it make? No matter how many hands we shake, how many voices have called our name, we live in this world alone. And the reality at the very end, in its truest form, is silent.
Everything in between is just killing time.
There was a time I used to run a bar for my uncle. A bar is a good place for you to watch people lie to themselves. A place that is full of lost people, looking for something they won’t find.
I’ve seen housewives fresh out from their gatherings come to me to toss their husband’s money to the wind, pretending they’re still free, beautiful, and young.
I saw weary men who had spent the day bowing to their work, singing bad karaoke songs, only to find solace in the chorus to convince himself at the moment that he could make his life feel less like a slow, suffocating death.
Then there were the young, wild-eyed, and restless, seeking a night that promised nothing but escape. They believe that if they drink enough, dance enough, laugh enough, as if the silence of reality were a beast they could outrun. They won’t have to think about tomorrow.
And I used to think maybe they were onto something. Maybe if you drown yourself in enough noise, you can trick yourself into feeling alive. Then for a little while, I let myself get pulled into it. I let myself be carried by it. Their happiness, artificial or not, became my own.
But the thing about noise is, it always ends. The music dies, the drinks stop flowing, the light goes out, and the doors, I’ve closed. All that’s left is one single soul, all alone, listening to the silence of breathe. It’s always there, waiting. It doesn’t care how loud you were, how drunk you got, how hard you laughed. It waits.
When it finally comes back. It presses down like a weight on your chest. A reminder that none of it was real.
Even on the streets, during the uproar of demonstrations. Voices rise like they mean something. Like they can shake the world awake. And maybe, for a second, it feels like they can. The air thick with voices demanding to be heard. I felt the same. We shouted, we marched, we drowned the world in our anger. And yet, it ends. The march ends, the banners are folded, The streets are emptied. All that’s left is the same empty souls, the same silence that was there before, waiting patiently as death.
The kind that seeps into the bones. The kind that reminds me once again. No matter how loud the world gets, silence is always waiting at the end.
