Barcelona

Thirteen is often thought to be an unlucky number but in my case, it is considered to be the opposite of that. While we quickly assume that the opposite of unlucky is lucky, I can’t say I’ve had an abundance of luck in terms of that which is most important to me, so now that 13 years have passed since I last lived here and I find myself as alone as I ever was- or maybe even more from the hardening caused by the experiences in between- and left without the eagerness and desires that propelled me through my youth, my path forward is one that is not well charted.

Yet the experiences are all I have, and what I have to show for them is mostly in my understanding of the world in which we live, which at once becomes both deeper and nonexistent the older I become. Having escaped from “the prison of youth,” I’m not convinced that taking the next step is worth the suffering inherent to sentient beings- or if living with these truths will even be bearable.

By succumbing to our own desires and insecurities, we either naively or selfishly create seemingly endless suffering to fill existential voids within ourselves, whether or not we admit it. We then congratulate ourselves for doing so, as if by fulfilling our evolutionary “purpose” we are doing the “Godly” thing- and go on to judge people who do not. We marginalize evolutionary outliers, which only leads to more suffering, seeming to forget that it was us who created these outliers in the first place. We confuse the “uncommon” with the “unnatural,” as if we don’t understand our own languages. We are unnecessarily cruel.

We create needs that would not exist had we ourselves not created them to give our lives purpose, and perhaps as a sort of insurance should we live long enough to become helpless in our inevitable decay. The decay is both gradual and swift, for our time here is short, but the years seem long in isolation, so whether or not we make it there depends on our perceived purposes, and whether or not we deem these important enough to go on.

These purposes- these experiences- involve too much suffering to tolerate outside of a shared construct with a close conspecific, but not all of us are lucky enough to find this person or even if we do, to be able to share our lives with them, especially if society has set us at a disadvantage from the start. Further, if we try too hard, or are too kind, or are too giving, we are ridiculed, not taken seriously, and not respected. People eventually sling so much shit on us that we begin to mistake ourselves for pieces of shit, even though it is the other way around.

Though does it matter that it is the other way around?

What matters is how the world makes us feel, and whether or not being a conscious part of it seems worth it.