Not anymore

 I was never meant for any of this.

Not for the hollow carnivals of artificial laughter, nor the grotesque ballet of borrowed smiles parading beneath sterile screens.

I do not belong amidst the featherless courtship rituals, where we strut like gaudy peacocks, not in search of souls, but of empty admiration, woven from carefully manufactured illusions. We no longer create; we only recycle tired thoughts, whisper them into the jaws of a machine, and marvel at the polished emptiness it returns.We do not grow lovelier; we grow only more synthetic, carved by knives, blurred by filters, reduced to identical facsimiles in a colony where difference is heresy.

We do not live, we perform.

We do not laugh, we rehearse.

We do not love, we pantomime tenderness before an indifferent crowd we do not know, and who cares nothing for us.

We no longer dance for joy, but for numbers on a screen.

We do not gather in friendship, but masquerade beneath the shallow banner of “living our best And I… I stand aside. I refuse to be swept into this glittering tide.

I do not wish to drown my mind in an endless scroll of hollow images, crafted to silence the soul.

Yet the world whispers its quiet threat: without a presence, I do not exist; without the exhibition of self, I am unworthy.

Let this stranger see you. No, wait! Perhaps that other stranger will approve. This one should comment, that one must adore...And so we march, step after step, toward the great grey sameness, condemning others, excusing ourselves, hiding behind perpetual unpreparedness, forever unready, forever afraid.

We no longer feel.

Not truly.

We have become dim silhouettes, shadows that have forgotten their own contours.

And me? Am I to surrender to this tide?

Never. I refuse to dissolve into this ashen cuLet us be creators once more. Let us lie beneath the vast sky and tell stories to the clouds as they drift silently above us. Let us debate foolish ideas with the gravity of philosophers. I jest not. Imagine, if mankind were oysters, upon which distant shore would the WW1 have broken loose?

Let us run again, not to arrive anywhere, but simply to run, like children untarnished by the weight of the world, with limbs flailing and hearts lighWhy do we flinch at scars upon our skin? They are no blemishes, but chapters. They are the proofs of life endured, of storms survived.

But the world does not crave truth, it worships uniformity.

Every face carved to the same vacant perfection, every body chiseled into cold symmetry, every glance polished until the soul vanishes behind glassy eyes.

We fear a world of machines, yet do not tremble as we ourselves become mechanical, soulless, lifeless, painfully idenWe flee from love, wrapping ourselves in the comforting shroud of trauma, building palaces of avoidance, mastering the art of concealment, until we are nothing but prisoners within gilded cages.

We have slaughtered our innocence, and we dance upon its grave.

We are no longer human beings, merely human-shaped phantoms, creatures incapable of wonder, incapable of devotion, incapable of lPerhaps our final tragedy shall not come by war, nor by famine, nor by the slow crumbling of the earth beneath our feet but by this: the silent, unnoticed death of love.

Ah… forgive me. I forgot.

It was wealth you feared losing most… was it not?