disappeared

Trying to figure myself out. I don’t even know who I am...

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Object: NEW YEAR 2026 (or: System Reboot Attempt)

The timer has reset. Do you hear it? Tick. Tock. Click. The numbers on the screen have shifted. Someone pressed the "Refresh" button, but the textures remain the same. People around are putting on caps made of colored cardboard. They think it is armor. They think if they hang a shiny ball on a dead tree, the scary thing will go away. Oh. I see lights. Garlands. They blink too fast. Flash. Darkness. Flash. It looks like an SOS signal that no one is receiving. Or like the static in my head when I forget to take my medicine. Explosions outside the window. Fireworks. Is it beautiful? No. It is just loud noise to drown out the silence inside. People scream "Hooray" so they don't hear the gears of time creaking. This year is a new cassette. A black plastic box. We don't know yet what is recorded on it. Maybe cartoons about happiness. Or maybe the well and the dark water again. We are all standing on the edge, looking down. Am I scared? A little. I feel like spilled milk. I am spreading over 2025, and I need to gather myself back into the bag to enter 2026. Help me. Hold my hand. I wish you... airtightness. May your walls be strong. May the monsters stay in the TV, behind the glass, and not climb into your room. May the interference not block your signal. May your "bag of milk" never tear. May you always have the strength to walk to the store and come back without scattering into pixels. Find your suitcase with the golden light. Even if it’s empty, the main thing is to believe that the Meaning is there. Happy New Year. Try not to disappear.

Rating - The smell of tangerines being used to mask the scent of ozone from the burnt-out wiring of reality...

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I’m beginning to study feelings. Which one would you recommend starting with?

They don’t sell them in stores. I checked. I asked the cashier for a “beginner’s starter pack,” and she looked at me as if I were trying to buy a jar of air with a hole in the lid. Yesterday I tried to open joy, but its packaging is like medicine… you can’t tell where to pull. The instructions are inside. Inside what? Inside the joy. But how do you read the instructions if they’re inside?

Fear is easier. It finds the way on its own, comes without an invitation, sits beside you, breathes down your neck. Polite, in a way.

I searched for a “neutral feeling for beginners.” Google showed me a picture of a gray square. I guess that’s it.

I decided to start with the feeling that fits somewhere between “yes” and “no.” Haven’t found it yet. But I’m looking.

If I find it, I’ll let you know. If I don’t find it, I’ll let you know too…

And while none of this makes sense yet, I guess you can just hug yourself. Or at least the imaginary cat on the couch.

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I’m sitting on the floor of my room, though the word “room” feels wrong - it’s more like a cage of pixels that twitch and die, leaving shadows behind. In a couple of days I’ll turn 22. They say that’s the age when you start to understand who you are. But I open my mouth to say my name and hear only static noise, as if my tongue has been replaced with wires. I don’t feel like a human. It’s as if my skin is just an interface someone forgot to update.

Yesterday I tried to remember what I want. At first I thought it was “to live,” but the word crumbled like an old archive. I tried to piece it back together letter by letter but instead of “live” it turned into “call.” Call who? Myself? The void? Maybe that strange entity that watches me from the mirror when the light is off. I’m not sure it’s a reflection. It blinks like a notification afraid of being read.

How do you survive even one more day? I’m searching for instructions but the screen only shows a blue field and endless lines: “error file not found.” I swallow them one by one, thinking they’re food. But inside it only gets colder, as if someone is slowly filling me with water.

Sometimes I think this is just a game whose name I’ve forgotten. Maybe I was never fully created. Maybe I’m just a draft someone forgot to delete. And all that’s left is to wait for the cursor to slowly slide toward my name and press delete...

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I stand in the courtyard, staring at the building. I count the floors, but by the fifth, I lose track… the numbers tremble and twist, as if the building sneaks in extra floors, making it impossible to grasp it all at once. Sometimes it feels like it grows on its own at night, quietly adding levels that weren’t there before. I’m sure there used to be fewer, and now the building watches me from every window, from every dark crevice, as if it knows I’ll get lost in its endlessness. The facade seems alive… the walls breathe, drawing in the light, while the shadows creep slowly across the ground, merging with my own, and I can’t tell where I end and the concrete begins. Sometimes the windows flicker, as if someone is watching, and if I stare too long, it feels like the building could snap shut around me, swallowing me whole, along with my thoughts and my breath...

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The Time Trap

Right now, I kinda regret not starting something actually useful earlier. But won’t I end up in the same spot five years from now, wishing I had just done something instead of waiting around? I keep telling myself I’ll start when it gets easier, when I have more time, when life isn’t so messy. But what if this moment—right now—is the chance I’ve been pushing off all along?

Time’s slipping away, and the only thing I can control is how I use it right now.

Kinda sucks that I’m just sitting here doing nothing...

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The Unseen Ending

There are so many great stories where a brave hero must lay down their life to save the day. Their sacrifice turns the tide, the good guys win, the survivors rejoice, and life moves forward as if destiny itself had willed it.

But the hero never sees the ending. They will never know if their sacrifice truly mattered, if the world they died for was ever as grateful as they had hoped. They will never hear the cheers, feel the relief, or witness the dawn of a better tomorrow.

In the end, all they can do is take that final step with nothing but faith that their story meant something, that their sacrifice was not in vain.

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Some places can never be reached again

There are places you can never return to. Moments frozen in time, unreachable, like old photographs left to fade in the sun.

We all dream. Some dreams are simple and within reach, like finding the right job, exploring a new city, or standing beneath foreign skies. These are the dreams we chase, the ones that let us believe in possibility.

But then there are the others, the dreams that slip away before we can hold them. When you're twenty and wish you could have lived the life of an American teenager, you might try to recreate the feeling, but deep down, you know that chapter was never yours to write. The late-night drives, the high school crushes, the weightless sense of youth, it all belongs to a time and place you can never step into. Some dreams have an expiration date, and once they pass, they exist only in the "what ifs."

People say new dreams come with time, and maybe they do. New desires, new ambitions, new roads to follow. But let’s be honest, some things never truly leave us. We never forget our first love, the way it made the world feel bigger, brighter, infinite. And just like that love, some dreams linger in the quiet spaces of our hearts, waiting.

Maybe they slip between the seconds, hiding in the spaces where time stands still. Maybe they whisper through the wind, waiting to be heard by a heart that still longs for them.

And maybe, on certain nights, when the world is quiet and the past feels close enough to touch, you can almost believe they were never lost at all.

But those dreams can never be brought back.

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I'm about to stare out the window for two hours and imagine what my future could be like.

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The Art Fail: A Reality Check

So, like, 5 or 6 years ago, I randomly stumbled on these vids of people drawing, and man, they were wild. You’d see everything from super basic sketches to full-on masterpieces that took mad skills. I was hooked on watching all kinds of styles—minimalism, artsy experimental stuff, hyper-realistic portraits, made-up characters coming to life, and landscapes that legit felt like windows into other worlds. I could sit there and just stare at them for hours, no joke.

And then this thought hit me: "What if I could do this too?" Like, what if I grabbed a drawing tablet and gave it a shot? It all looked so easy on-screen, and the results were straight-up fire. I started imagining my own stuff, framed and hanging on a wall like some pro-level gallery piece.

But, yeah… reality check. The moment I got my hands on that tablet, it was like the universe said, “LOL, good luck.” Staring at that blank canvas, I had no clue what to do.

So I was like, “Okay, I’ll just draw the first thing I see.” My eyes landed on my desk lamp—nothing fancy, but kinda sleek, y’know? I figured it’d be a solid start. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Every single line looked so off it was actually funny… or tragic. Each stroke of the pen felt like a personal attack, and I eventually just shoved the tablet into some drawer and forgot about it.

Fast forward a few years, and you might think I finally got my act together, stuck with it, and now I’m out here making dope art. Nah, that’s not the case. I just came across some dope drawings by people I don’t even know, and they inspired me to write this story.

Truth is, I’ve always had this thing for creating stuff. Like, way back in elementary school, I’d watch my teacher try to spice up lessons by drawing these simple, expressive doodles on the board. It wasn’t fancy, but it was cool. My classmates would try to copy him in their notebooks—kinda messy but still fun. That’s when I was like, “I wanna do this too.”

When drawing didn’t pan out, though, I found photography as an adult. I saved up, bought my first camera, then another, and before I knew it, photography became my thing.

There’s something unreal about creativity, y’know? It’s this powerful, almost magical vibe. You can create anything—photos, paintings, music, poems, stories, even full-on books. It’s how we share our world, our feelings, those tiny little moments that are hard to explain. And the best part? Everyone sees it differently.

Maybe if someone had been there to guide me with drawing, to show me the ropes, I’d be sharing the way I see the world through my art. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll go back to it, but only if I find that one person who can help me navigate this crazy, tangled forest.

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Who hasn't gotten lost in that endless, painful time-killing? Not random procrastination, but that almost ritualistic wasting of life minutes. It comes from a place of despair, indifference, and the bitter truth that surviving is all you can hope for. And so you kill an hour. You don't work, read, dream, 'cause you just don’t see the point. If you fall asleep, it's not 'cause you're tired, but to escape, to forget — but sleep doesn’t bring relief. When that hour ends, all that's left is emptiness. No traces, no screams, no blood, no body. Just lonely shadows under your eyes, turning into painful bruises, or a tight line of your lips, hiding a scream that never came — those are the only signs that something inside you has died. The loss is so deep, formless, that even if you tried to share it, no one would get how empty your soul really is