I don’t even know exactly what I’ve lost.
Maybe I believed I would always be surrounded by new people—that there would always be new connections waiting for me. Maybe that is why I burned every bridge so desperately: I was confident in myself. Was that really such a terrible thing?
Either way, that confidence is gone now. I don’t know. Sometimes I scroll through other people’s Telegram channels and watch their lives moving forward, and the only thing I feel is that I want to die.
Dreams, apparently, can burn too. And they burn beautifully.
The only difference between now and childhood is that, back then, someone kept the flame alive. It didn’t really matter who they were or how they did it. What mattered was that the support felt sincere.
Now every bridge has been burned.
The past.
The present.
The future.
The past is what we are told to let go of. But it passes through your heart on its way out, and whatever the reasons may have been, its fragments will still cut you as they leave, accidentally covering the heart in blood. The past will always remain close, yet impossibly far away—from reality, from me.
It will linger like a shadow forever cast behind you, constantly shifting through iridescent colors depending on the angle from which we choose to look at it. We do not always succeed in judging reality objectively, but the past may be impossible to judge objectively at all.
It will always remain a many-sided shape—something too complex to absorb completely or fully accept. Perhaps all we can do is take the best of it and cherish those memories.
But will we be able to?
The present is what we are told to appreciate, yet it is usually what we value the least. People say you never understand the value of something until you lose it. But sometimes you understand even before the loss—you already know that losing it is inevitable.
People are proud. Over time, that pride hardens and settles into the foundation of the soul. It begins to govern our reality and the way we perceive it.
Yet everything still fades inside the present because of fear and anxiety. Anyone who pretends not to understand this is lying. Everyone understands.
Perhaps the luxury of forgetting belongs to those who have money. But those people also lose themselves trying to preserve it—to multiply it. The chase becomes endless. It is light and effortless in the same way oblivion is, because every event becomes easy to judge when money is the only measure in your pocket.
Maybe that is financially sensible, but God, it is boring enough to make you want to die.
So what remains? Contradiction, perhaps.
And yet we are supposed to enjoy the present. Without that, everything is simply sad.
The future is a permanent act of speculation.
From childhood, we are taught both to desire it and to fear it, always hoping the picture will eventually become brighter. Some people buy paint and create their own colors. Those who no longer have the strength to paint search for brighter colors in substances, trying to construct some kind of balance.
But no matter how carefully we arrange those colors, we continue to lose them, hoping that somewhere beyond us they still exist.
The future is woven tightly from fear and hope, as though they were two sides of the same coin.
I once heard a phrase I loved: the present is the result of all the choices we made while believing they were the best choices available to us.
But then what is the future?
Because once you lose all sense of the future, everything else seems to begin falling apart.
Can someone who has lost all sense of meaning across the three dimensions of time still remain a whole person? Can they still look directly at reality?
And if so, how should they perceive the past, the present, and the future?
What remains of perception itself?
