On How We Invented Ourselves

Thrown back into the narrative.
All you never came to know — now named.
The face you see each morning
Was formed in the world
Before you ever said your first “no”.
Are you the author of your “yes”?
Or merely a text
Reading itself aloud?

Here is your first incurable disappointment:
Your habit of calling something real —
Only the speed at which you forget
That everything occurs only in retrospect.
Your “now”: a memory of a thought.

O, hostage of interpretation!
Flee your own delay!
For this, you wander the horizontal plane.

Begin with the worst.
From the point where all repeats.
Stuck in déjà vu, though you cannot see:
Time has compressed. You are in a jar —
The very jar they kept fleas in.
No place to run. Only to leap.

Try another form. Begin to accumulate.
More, more, more.
“Look, I am gathering myself!”
Or are you merely diluting yourself?

You have become a museum of your own possibilities,
A thick volume no one opens.

Move further — into the automatic.
Eat without tasting. Speak without hearing.
Love without remembering whom.

What are you hoarding?
That which will never come to be.

Then further still.
You begin to see patterns. Build systems.
Understand how understanding occurs.
Just another room in the same house.

Then you find your comfort.
The bliss of regularity.
A freeze-frame disguised as peace.

There is one more room.
You see enough to choose,
But not enough to hold the choice.
Dancing at the edge. Returning. Dancing again.

But look closer.
Seize the chance for transformative solitude.
Study the crack in the wall. Look through it:
The wall is merely scenery.
And yourself within it!
Not “I am alone, O God,”
But solitude: not a state, but a structure.
You are not inside the painting. You stand before it.
Yet even this “before” remains a position.
Once more, the impossibility of being where you wish to be.

Hold to it. Not as a hero. Not for an outcome.
Maintain clarity when you wish to leave the room.
Here resides unnecessary suffering.
Invert it.

Not suffering as the pain of passivity,
But suffering as tension!
The point where reality reveals its interconnectedness.

You realise: the process cannot cease —
Awareness observing itself.
The terror to which you are bound.
Every attempt remains part of the same process.

Your outcomes are set:
Return to the cursed horizontal plane.
Fear, retreat, spiral,
Accumulate, understand, and settle into comfort.

“But I have moved beyond it” you call into the void,
Having merely renamed your project.

Authenticity lies in dissolving every project.
You are process, not object.
Your “I” is a verb, not a noun.
Where have you led yourself?
To the place where all argument ends.
Where even “I am cold” remains merely words,
And the word “solitude” becomes the same nothing
At which you now smile.

From the terror of awareness there is no escape,
But knowing becomes creation in play.
You look at others — not with pity,
But see: every living being
The same process and thrownness,
Tension, and ironic connectedness.

And so you are at the beginning again.
Thrown back into the narrative...
You feel the aloneness.
And finally, you are home.
Not the one who understood. Not the one who...
Your actions — without alibi.
Absolute freedom facing nothingness,
Where you are the path, not the traveller.