There is a moment you don’t remember, and it’s the first thing that ever happens to you.
You are pulled—screaming—from darkness into something loud and hot. The light blinds you, the air stings your skin, and everything you once knew, if anything, is gone. And from the first breath, your body begins to die. No one tells you that. They just swaddle you in cloth and say welcome.
No one says, “this will hurt.”
Life will hand you days that taste like ash, mornings where your chest is unable to hold your heart, nights so quiet they feel like punishment. The people you love will die. The people you trust will fail you. You will fail them too. You will wish, sometimes, that you could start over, or stop altogether. That it would all just freeze for a minute—because it is going too fast, and you can’t hold any of it.
The cruelest part is that you will not know when the last time is.
The last time someone says your name with love. The last time you see your childhood home. It will all feel ordinary when it is happening. You’ll be looking elsewhere, thinking of something stupid. And then it’s gone. You will spend the rest of your life remembering something you didn’t even realize you were supposed to cherish.
Nothing lasts. Everything you build will decay. Everything you love will slip through your fingers eventually. You are not meant to keep. You are meant to carry—briefly—and then let go. Again, and again.
And still you stay.
Still, you get up. Still, you choose this world—with all its horror, its filth, its unbearable noise. Because nestled in that wreckage is something so blindingly beautiful it almost doesn’t make sense.
People.
An impossible, aching species.
People are disgusting. People are divine. They kill and they mourn, and they dance. They invent bombs and lullabies. They burn forests and worship them. They cage each other and cradle each other. They forget history and they repeat it. A plague, and a salvation.
To belong to humanity is to inherit contradiction. One is made of everyone who came before—tyrants and healers, cowards and saints—and you carry it in your blood. Everyone is a mosaic of every horror and every miracle that ever was.
It is terrifying. To be aware. To feel so much, to know so much, to love something so fleeting. Your own death lurks like a shadow behind every decision, every embrace, every breath. And the world doesn’t stop. It doesn’t grieve for you.
Maybe that’s mercy.
Maybe meaning doesn’t live in permanence, but in the fact that anything exists at all. That in the cold vacuum of senselessness, we still make soup when someone is sick. We still sing in the car. We still memorize faces. We still find ways to say, “I love you.”
People are all part of that. People are not separate. Grief like this is ancient. Laughter is shared across time. There are strangers you will never meet that will understand you better than anyone. That’s not tragedy. That is evidence—that people are stitched together by something invisible and real. Something holy, maybe. Or maybe just human.
One doesn’t have to know the point of any of this.
You don’t have to find a grand purpose, to fix everything, or earn your place. You’re already here. That’s enough. That’s everything. You get to bear witness. You get to leave fingerprints. You get to be hurt and come back anyway.
That’s the strange redemption of all this.
You were given a life you didn’t ask for—and you chose to live it. You chose the fire, the sorrow, the year of almosts. You stayed when it would’ve been easier to vanish. You let yourself be seen. You tried, even when nothing made sense.
Maybe that is what matters: not that you were perfect nor good—but that you were here.
You were here.
Somewhere, someone is grieving too.
Somewhere, someone is laughing at something stupid.
Somewhere, someone is holding the hand of a former stranger.
Somewhere, someone is alive.
