Life is shit.

Sorry for the bluntness, but I didn't know where to begin.

It's exhausting, waiting for a reply that may never come. The screen stays blank while my mind races. Seconds stretch into minutes, minutes into hours. I check again, nothing.

I'm frustrated, life's a rollercoaster, up and down, round and round. Not very imaginative, am I?

These tired metaphors we cling to when nothing else makes sense.
Down and down to the bottom we go.

Thought I'd grown up, clearly haven't. The carousel never stops, just keeps spinning with the same scenery. The same old frustrations resurface like clockwork, predictable as tides, unexpected as earthquakes.

Still making the same mistakes I made at twenty-two. Faces change, words change, but the dance remains eerily familiar.

I said a couple of mean things. Knew it would hit a nerve. And it did. But move on from it? We did not.

The joke lands, the laugh dies, the silence grows.
Foolish? Foolish.

Foolish.

The heart is easily wounded but hard to understand. Warmth and patience go a long way, but sometimes so does a kick in the butt.

Another glance at the phone.

Still nothing.

Why does everything seem so complicated? Relationships shouldn't require calculus to solve, yet here I am, trying to derive the formula for "I'm sorry" without losing the variable of my self-respect.

But wait—it all makes sense now!

What does?

Nothing!!!

We're all just messed-up primates with oversized heads running around thinking we've got it figured out.
I'm especially notorious for that. The arrogance of certainty, my specialty.

Not everything is a puzzle.
Nothing fits together perfectly. It's all just a mismatched patchwork until it looks cohesive, like those abstract paintings that sell for millions because someone decided the chaos has meaning.

And then someone comes along, something happens—a careless word, a mean comment that cuts deeper than intended—and it's all thrown to pieces.

As you pick them back up, you think, "I'll put it back together better than last time." The eternal optimist's delusion.

But no—the pieces were never meant to fit together. They were never broken in the first place. Or maybe they were, but why does it matter? You've got the fucking pieces. Maybe the wholeness we seek is just another illusion.

The stars look different tonight. Brighter, more distant. I wonder if they're watching us stumble through these human dramas with cosmic amusement.

Sitting out in the night with all the quiet really is nice. The world doesn't often grant us these pauses. I wonder how we get by every day with so much noise around us, so much information flooding in and out. Notifications, alerts, texts, calls—the incessant hum of connectivity. We can hardly hear ourselves think. Maybe that's by design. Silence forces confrontation with ourselves.

Fuck!!!
No reply yet...

Eighteen hours now. My message sits there, read but unanswered. The digital equivalent of being left hanging mid-conversation at a party. The blue check marks mock me.

I'm visibly torn between sending that confirmation message or just leaving it with my pride intact.

Pride?

Ha!

What an absurd concept.

Pride is the devil. Keeping us lonely and right instead of connected and happy.

Fucking apologize, will I?

At worst, keep getting ignored. Or maybe they take the apology and all is forgiven.

The math seems simple enough.

But it's hard, isn't it? Apologizing for something I don't think I did wrong.

"It was just a joke," I tell myself, the mantra of the accidentally cruel.

"Can't they take a joke? Why's they gotta be so fragile?"

The excuses pile up, each one more brittle than the last.

No, you ignorant prick—it wasn't cool. It wasn't nice.

Shit is fine when you're not the one paying the price.

When did humor become weaponized? When did we start hiding daggers in our punchlines?

Memory replays the moment—their face falling, the light dimming in their eyes, my stomach dropping as I realized I'd crossed a line I didn't know existed.

And now this silence.

This deafening digital silence.

Calmer now, thinking about it, but still clueless about what to do.

Sigh.

The night air fills my lungs, cool and indifferent to my troubles.

For how long will I keep this up? One mistake and it saps all my energy away, a constant urge to put out the fire.

It's exhausting, this emotional firefighting. The constant vigilance against saying the wrong thing, being misunderstood, hurting someone I care about without intending to.

It's fine, I know. Not everything works out. Hell, little ever does... and that's okay. The universe doesn't owe us neat resolutions or happy endings. That's just another story we tell ourselves to make the chaos bearable.

I won't get along with everyone. Never have.

There's a graveyard of relationships in my past—friendships, romances, colleagues—all faded into memory for reasons that seemed important at the time.

Not everyone will like me.

Not everything I say will be understood, most of it won't.

Some bridges will get burnt.

Best not to be standing on them when they do.

The phone buzzes. Heart jumps. A notification, but not from them. Just another reminder of something else I'm supposed to care about.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. Maybe it doesn't matter as much as I think it does. In the grand scheme of things, those stars, that cosmos, the infinite expanse of time—this moment is infinitesimal.

A blip.

A pixel in the portrait of existence.

Still hurts, though.
Still matters.
Still waiting for that reply.