I am sitting in my cluttered apartment, watching the world through a screen, watching the impossible rhythms of us. A documentary.
There are people moving in perfect, fluid sync across distant lands — hundreds of souls dancing as a single body, breathing the same air, bound by tradition. I watch ancient sculptures carved with a precision so delicate, so devotionally slow, that it feels like a language our modern hands have completely forgotten how to speak. We built monuments out of patience once. We made art that demanded a lifetime.
And yet, in the very same breath, our progress looks like cold machinery.
It is haunting, really, how our brilliance twists. We honed that same breathtaking human ingenuity to forge bullets, to refine weapons of mass destruction, to engineer our own undoing with immaculate mathematical precision. We learned how to shatter the world before we ever truly learned how to live in it together.
How did we get here? What did we trade away in the name of moving forward?
I look at them, rich in belonging, and then I look at my own life, surrounded by the conveniences of progress, and I wonder where I went wrong. Why am I still struggling just to exist? How did I end up so tired in a world that promises everything?
The documentary cuts to a quiet village. People living with almost nothing — in conditions the modern world would label as poverty — yet their laughter is unburdened. There is a simple, radiant warmth in their eyes that I haven't felt in years.
And that’s the part that catches in my throat.
It’s a strange, aching thing to belong to a species so capable of overwhelming beauty, so prone to tragic violence, and to feel so immensely lost somewhere in between.
2087
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