It’s been a while…
And in the interim, the world hasn’t paused for breath. While I stayed still, clinging to an inert existence, everything around me kept spinning, relentless in its pace. I became the prickly thorn on a smooth road, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t match the rhythm of the world moving beneath my feet. Each second became a grain of sand in an endless hourglass, slipping through with quiet precision, while I stood suspended in my own stuttering existence.
I tried to convince myself that stillness was a kind of survival. That if I just stayed motionless long enough, the chaos would pass me by, the storms of life would calm, and somehow, I would emerge unscathed. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? The world is built on motion. Even in nature, nothing is truly still. The air, the oceans, the earth itself—all constantly in flux. And here I was, pretending I could avoid that inevitable pull. The more I clung to this illusion of stillness, the more I became the very thing that disrupted the natural flow. Like a thorn lodged in a machine—small, seemingly insignificant, but capable of grinding the gears to a halt.
There’s something almost surreal about leaving digital traces in this wilderness of ones and zeros. It’s as if each word, each keystroke, is destined to vanish in a desert of bits, like a fleeting whisper lost in the infinite, chomped away by the ever-hungry algorithm that devours everything in its path. It’s strange to think of this digital presence as some ghostly version of myself, slipping into the void. Am I really here? Or am I just pixels, scattered data lost in the crowd of a billion other forgotten things? And so, even as I hesitated, watching the world surge forward on its ladder of life—people climbing up, others falling down—I could hardly gather enough momentum to even step onto the first rung. I wasn’t sure if I was afraid of the climb or indifferent to the fall.
The funny thing about being stuck in your own stillness is that it doesn’t just affect you. My friend Potato—steady, rooted—was the one tether keeping me from vanishing entirely. It wasn’t easy, though. Potato had no taste for dust and disappearance, no patience for a slow descent into obscurity. They could see what I couldn’t—or maybe refused to. They knew that letting me slip away would mean watching me become something far worse than invisible. Potato tugged at the invisible ropes of companionship, even when my limbs refused to cooperate. They didn’t let me spiral into the comforting numbness I thought I wanted. In some ways, Potato became a reminder that the world, no matter how heavy, is shared. And you can’t leave without it leaving an echo.
But despite that pull, I still found myself at odds with movement. The irony is, that the more I tried to stay still, the more chaos seemed to ripple outward. My efforts to remain stationary, to not disrupt the flow, ended up causing a quiet kind of turbulence—one that rattled against my insides and clattered into the world around me. It wasn’t a loud chaos. It was the subtle kind that sneaks up on you, a shifting of energy that eventually cracks the veneer of calm I tried so hard to maintain. I thought that by staying still, I could keep everything in order. But life doesn’t work like that. Order and stillness are fragile illusions, easily shattered by the sheer force of time.
At first, it was awkward, that attempt to rejoin the living. My fingers—clumsy traitors—resisted the cruel necessity of movement. The keys, cold beneath my touch, felt like foreign objects, demanding more than I could offer. It’s strange how something so simple, something I used to do without thinking, had become this insurmountable task. But slowly, as stubborn as the rust clinging to old iron, I began to move. The arcs of flesh and bone that make up my hands found their rhythm again, even if only slightly. I felt each keystroke like an uncomfortable awakening, a hesitant start, but it was movement nonetheless.
The creaking, hesitant motions mirrored my mental state—stiff, slow, and uncertain, but not entirely immobile. It’s strange how even the smallest shift feels like a monumental effort when you’ve been stagnant for so long. Each movement seemed to invite its own kind of chaos, a disruption of the quiet nothingness I had built around myself. But maybe, just maybe, that chaos was necessary. Maybe stillness isn’t where life is found. Maybe it’s in the discord, in the messiness of trying to move forward. In some ways, I became the chaos I feared. But maybe, just maybe, chaos is where rebirth begins.
It’s been a while………..
