i will forever think 2016 was four years ago

you remember, don't you?

i’m so tired. recently, i’m tired every day. bored with my life and whatever comes with it.

i don’t know what caused this. was it the semester break? that one week off that dropped me into a slump i can’t escape? or maybe it’s the change itself, the forcing myself out of my comfort zone. i know it’s stupid that i didn’t do it before, but now i’m making myself leave the house more, speak to people (wow!), and i’m starting to think i’m an introverted extrovert or however you label it now. i’ve lost track of all these labels. they’re exhausting, aren’t they?

i yearn for christmas holidays and fear them in the same breath, because i’ll have to go home and be with everyone, and there i have a label too. it doesn’t matter what i do to rip it off—it always remains attached to me. i think we all do this: in every city, there’s a different version of ourselves. we leave pieces of our souls attached to places, and when we return, those pieces jump back onto us. you can’t take the city out of the man. my fragmented soul is everywhere at once. i’ve changed so many times, city to city, and i don’t know if there’s a place where i like the character i’ve constructed. i might not have found it yet. or i’ll never find it. and then what is this wandering for, if it doesn’t bring me anywhere?

or is that the problem—this absolute need to give meaning, to insert a label, to tick a box? is that what’s blocking me from happiness?

there’s this dread gnawing at me constantly these past months, certainly because december 31st, 2025 is approaching. another year, gone. the numbers change so quickly. i remember being a child, confused about what year it was when i had to write the date on a school exam. i wrote 2011 when it was already 2012. and i remember the last time we could play that game, you remember, don’t you? the one we all waited for: 12.12.2012 at 12:12:12. there’s a sadness knowing it won’t happen again for another hundred years and i won’t be there. i had to experience it once and i didn’t, because i didn’t understand the weight of it. or maybe it was that small, stupid fear, even though i didn’t believe it, that the world would end in 2012.

i hadn’t lived my life then.

but now we’re almost in 2026, and i think i haven’t lived my life either.

maybe 2012 was the last year time felt solid. after that, everything turned to smoke.

the years of covid: they’re just smoke. the years after 2020 are all smoke, fog we breathe in, little water particles showing us the illusion of what those years were. pillars made of iron, serviceable and dependable—sure, they’ll remain there, they won’t break. but they stand on a cliff of ice, and the ice is melting.

the illusion is what we breathe now.

i will forever think 2016 was four years ago, even though i know that in one month it will be ten years ago. how is that possible? how? i know it’s wrong, i know it’s wrong for my brain to form this faulty certainty, but it does it anyway. time collapsed somewhere between then and now, and i can’t unfold it again.

they told me (and still tell me) i have a feverish fantasy. that my mind invents things all the time, that it speaks alone. in my head i’ve had full conversations since i was a child. i remember thinking that’s not normal. but what the fuck is normal then? imagination is fine, creating dialogues is the result of solitude, isn’t it? and in all that solitude, with all these problems, where do we hide? in art. literature, music, dance, visual arts—the list goes on and on.

we escape to the world that isn’t touchable, to the world that is an illusion per se, and yet it’s the only place that makes us feel, makes us feel alive again.

so then the hypocrisy slips in. the hypocrisy of those the society grants some sort of higher position in its fucked-up hierarchy. “you’re writing? you dance? you paint?” and they’ll watch you like an alien, like you’ve confessed to something shameful. because how could you possibly go after that? how could you choose a life building castles in the air when there are real foundations to be laid, real careers to be had?

but the soil melted.

their pillars fell down the cliff.

ours are flying in the sky.