At fifteen, my mind burns with questions that no air conditioning unit could cool. The heat is not external—it is the kind that settles deep, pressing against reason, suffocating thought, and impossible to escape.
One of these questions should be the reason for one's existence.
'Apparently, you have a mission to accomplish.'
But what mission? What path? Who decides that?
Do I exist?
It should be a simple question, but simplicity is a deception, a trick played by the universe to make answers seem attainable. I reach for certainty, only for it to dissolve—like smoke, vanishing before I can grasp it.
My senses function. My body responds. My family stands whole. 'Well not exactly.'
Yet reality feels like a thin film stretched over an unseen truth—fragile, fabricated, fleeting.
Perhaps I am not human at all.
Perhaps I am a spirit desperately trying to experience human life through borrowed senses. 'I love how delusional I can be sometimes.' That would explain the detachment, the echo-like emotions, the way I stand in the centre of conversations yet remain untouched by them.
> Imagine two planets with a distance of 10 meters in between, one is reality and the other is fiction. You will see some people floating and others flying between the planets, no matter where they go, they are always tied to reality. These ties depend on one's connection to reality. Some tethered by fragile threads, others held by chains. And me?
I wonder what binds me, if anything at all.
There is a place—silent, weightless—where the detached exist. Those with splitting straps, they can feel the fading connection but with no motive to hold on to them. They eventually become dissociated, drifting naturally into confusion.
They see the world like fragments through a car window—flashing lights, unclear noise, blurred movement.
And in that space, I drift.
I see flashes, light and sound splintering across my consciousness like a broken projection.
I stand, motionless, bound by dreams I have chained myself to—chains snaking up my legs, across my waist, around my ribs, tightening in my clenched fists.
Am I real?
I breathe. I ache. Yet, I feel unreal, weightless.
The answer should fit neatly into the palm of my hand, like a stone warmed by time. But reality dissolves into grey clouds.
The more I fan them, the thicker and darker they become. Like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands—elusive and short-lived. The harder I seek answers, the less I seem to know.
I cry, but my tears feel fake. My heart remains indifferent.
So then, what are my tears if not a hollow reaction? Are they real when my heart refuses to acknowledge them? Or are they simply the physical remnants of an emotional void—vast, deep, endless?
And what of the universe? The world? Are they real? Or were they fabricated by someone like me—someone lost, someone searching, someone desperately trying to give shape to meaning?
What determines who is or isn't real?
Philosophically, real is existence beyond the mind. 'Yet, I exist within the mind and beyond its boundaries.'
Scientifically, real is what can be measured. 'My height, my weight, my pulse, are quantifiable. Thus, through the lens of science, I am real.'
Psychologically, real is self-discovery. 'Which personality? They say the one uniquely combined. Yet, mine seem to exist independently of each other.'
Socially, real is vulnerability. 'Yet, why expose myself, only to have my vulnerabilities exploited?'
Am I alive?
I feel emotions. I think. I improve. Yet, I exist on the edge of what's real—a ghost in my own life, a silent observer watching the world move without me.
I try to break through, to step into reality fully, to reach out. But there is always a glass wall, standing between myself and the world. No matter how hard I push, I do not pass through.
So, what am I? Real, alive, or merely existing?
Real is being part of space and time. Alive is change and growth. Existing is life without direction.
I am existing. Yet, if I had no direction, then where does my will to live come from?
What keeps me here?
Survival has never been difficult to escape. It would take only a moment. Anything can be a weapon, a coin swallowed. A pencil pressed too deep.
Yet, I stay. I remain.
Tell me—can you still say I have no direction?