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branthan

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  • branthan 5w

    Here are a few things you can give a read.
    #universehydrogenandpeople
    #justamidlifecrisis
    #natureisspeaking


    A few books that you can try.

    Some deep stuff.
    1. Meditation by Marcus Aurelius
    2. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
    3. Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzche
    4. Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
    5. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
    I have no idea about 99% of the things in these books, but some of you may understand them way better.

    Some nonfiction stuff.
    1. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
    2. Educated by Tara Westover
    3. A Promised Land by Obama
    4. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates


    Some stuff to understand the nature and future of our existence.
    1. Behave by Robert Sapolsky (one of the best books ever written)
    2. Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey
    3. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark
    4. Why We Sleep
    5. How to Create a Mind
    6. Human Compatible
    7. Computing with Quantum Cats
    8. A Brief History of Time
    9. All of Yuval Noah harrari's works (obviously)
    10. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb (a bit controversial, but definitely interesting)


    And some random stuff
    1. Midnight library
    2. Anxious people
    3. Gentleman in Moscow
    4. All the lights we cannot see
    5. Aristotle and Dante discovers the secret of the universe
    6. Beneath a scarlet sky
    7. Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (absolutely loved it)



    And more importantly, go and read about Yukio mishima's life. Then read his works, it's mind-blowing and you can thank me later for this one. Or buy me coffee ☕


    You can comment any recommendations of books or songs or things you want me to write about one day. See you around if I ever decided to show up to write anything.

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  • branthan 5w

    I do not know how many more words I could write before it becomes some bleak lines that barely make sense to any. It is as if they collapse one after another as you try to figure out how they all fit into the two am nights of summer. The world is burning, you can feel it in the air, wind burning everything that it touches. I remember standing at the door of an autumn eve, letting the wind whisper its secret crush on the dandelions. How it kisses her and makes her fly, writing a beautiful eulogy in the end. Things have been different lately, there is too much death when the world falls deaf. The death you can't romanticize about.

    You turn off the AC and go back to the familiar creek of the fan from the ceiling. There is a sense of solitude as the world falls quiet for a moment in that darkness, I wish I knew how to write about the world, the world that I feel in that transient moment of solitude. How do you know what it is that you're feeling or the why?

    I've read somewhere that, to understand free will you must understand the difference between making your decisions and predicting your decisions. I do not know what it means. But there is something so poignant about it, the helplessness of merely existing. Helplessness when the words fail to fall into the right place as you try hard to fix a few lines to tell a story.

    You miss rain on a day like this, the first raindrop splattering on the broken twigs as roots slowly drown into the soil for a new life, a new beginning as if someone just hit a reset button. There is a sense of home in the emanating petrichor from the first rain that hits your skin. I do not know what it carries; sadness or happiness or longing for a familiar touch.

    You talk in the strangest times, about things that keep flooding your mind. Of all the seasons you romanticized about, how you always hated the summer.
    But, I've always loved the way how you talk about rain. Of all the people that you ever loved who never knew how to love you back, I wonder if anyone ever danced with you in heavy rain.
    Why do you love rain?
    Is it the subtle sadness it brings on a sunny day? You always had a thing for melancholy, or is it the way it touches your skin in a way that no one ever did? Does it burn when it kisses your summer scars?

    The pursuit of happiness is a lie if you ask me, if you want to feel the world, you need to take it all in. From the way the flower blooms, how it gently open its petals to see the beauty of the world, to how it slowly burn and wither away into the soil as if it was never there. If I could I would've told you all about it, about how to feel the world, bit by bit, word by word.

    But there are words caught in our throats, tightening its grip every time you try to speak. So you disappear in the middle of a story when the world falls asleep, it is as if you were never there. You wish you could understand this, how everything becomes so disconnected at nightfall, even when it burns, even when it drowns. How you run out of words, run out of sound, run out of places, and engulfed in a melancholy. As if you're wandering through the woods after a heavy rain, barefoot, breaking free of all the silent sighs, not lost but never wants to be found.

    You can feel the silence between the lines, around the curls on your favorite book that you keep coming back to, around the edges of the words, a silence someone left behind. But you can't quite figure out why you feel that slight melancholy even when it all feels so disconnected.

    There is sadness in the silence, the silence between one word and another. There is sadness emanating from the trees, from the leaves, from the birds, from the chimes of a window where a widow weeps. You can feel it everywhere.

    will you stay,
    near the shoreline
    of my obsolescence,
    when the summer
    bide a little longer?

    what do you call a river
    when it dries up
    is it still a river or just,
    another reminiscence?

    like a poet without the words,
    a city without the crowd.
    dust descends into the voids
    and it becomes a memory,
    to history to another story
    and you forget.

    this season will wither away
    into a bare minimum of existence.
    you and I will be nothing
    but dust, drifting between places and time.

    but will you stay a little longer
    for a summer rain?
    to survive another drought,
    to drown in another flood?
    will you stay this time?


    #justamidlifecrisis

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  • branthan 5w

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  • branthan 6w

    I have been thinking about writing to my best friend, it's been a while since we wrote to each other on the yellow postcards that travel through places to reach our door. I love the certain calm that it carries, where you don't have to worry about instant replies. You can take your time, one word after another with your shitty handwriting to make it personal. You are not doing it for the sake of it, but for the human connection that it holds. A sense of belongingness in a world that is always in a rush.

    Sometimes you know what to write on the places left on the card for a destination, but you don't know what to talk about. Sometimes you know what to talk about but don't know the destination. Isn't it always a struggle? Not just waking up every morning but trying to find that human connection that pushes you through the days till you collapse into a night?

    It's been ages since we talked, we aren't the same people back when it all made a lot of sense in a simpler world. I think, when people drift out of this edge of familiarity, you feel alienated. It is like, getting thrown out of this world to another where everything that you touch wither away. Do we belong in the wrong worlds? A reality that isn't quite ours?

    It is such a painful thing, to share the pain of another when the night falls heavy on your shoulder. How do you tell someone that you want to die? Not because you are sad, but because sometimes it makes no sense as to why you wake up to fall asleep again. We walk in and out of these contradictions of death and living, trying to come up with some lines to keep holding on for a few days, few more letters that arrive with the summer rain.

    I don't remember what you feel about rain, whether you hate the way it falls on your skin or loves the way how it drowns you to the depths. But there is something so familiar about it, with every fall burning your summer skin, you feel like a human. It is unfair of us to pour our sorrows away into the late-night conversation when you don't know who walks on the thin line of blues. Yet, on some nights, it feels safe to drown in the open ocean with a familiar face to pull you out to the surface.

    There is a constant war on our minds, whether we want to be found or to be lost. It is hard to figure out where this journey is taking us, yet we walk like we know the destination. Like, letters. You don't know when they will reach your door, but it makes you feel connected when it arrives with stories you never knew from worlds that you've never seen.

    We yearn for this connection, a connection that is not tied to the binary strings but takes its time to reach you. In another world, in another time, pulling you back to the edge of familiarity that feels so personal.

    We are these blurry lines, fading shadows, mere outlines of remembrance. Lost between light and dark on the edge where the world falls out of its existence. How long are we going to be lost, before we collapse into mere stories about the part of us that always wanted to be found, always wanted to return?

    #justamidlifecrisis

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  • branthan 6w

    Why do you exist? No, it is not a question about a deeper philosophical meaning to existence, but a simple question on why do you wanna live for another day and do not want to escape the sound that the clock makes?

    You breathe in and out of this existence, exhausting every bone and merely collapsing into the night to do it all over again.

    There is a sense of normality that no one wants to question. It is as if we are here for a reason. I think it gives a certain purpose to this mundanity, you wake up in and out of it without questioning why it is the way that it is. Sometimes we are attached to things that make not a lot of sense, like love and stars perhaps. The longer you try not to ponder too much about this benign comfort, the better you sleep with some plans to a tomorrow that doesn't exist.

    I do not know where I'm going with this, it doesn't have the structure and discipline to be something meaningful, art. I wish I knew the right words to tell you about the way how each neuron lights up and creates a subjective reality that feels so personal.

    Sometimes you feel too much, it is as if all the words the world has to offer is not enough to pen it down on a white sheet of paper that looks as empty as the space between stars where light forgot to touch. You're not sure what to make of it, what it is that you're feeling, or the why.

    You read all the books you could find, yet feel so empty as the day before. Maybe there are lines between the lines that you do not know how to read, maybe all that you see is all that you can understand. You talk, to a stranger after another at three in the morning in a hope that they feel the same, that they could understand but it ends the same mundane way, predictable.

    I've read somewhere that language is the reason we have evolved to be different from the creatures that lurk in the dark. The cognitive tradeoff hypothesis argues that during our evolution, humans had to sacrifice our short-term memory to facilitate complex language capabilities.
    Perhaps, language is the one thing holding our civilization together, letting us express whatever it is that we are feeling to feel better or worse in the next moment. It is such a beautiful thing when you think about it, by carefully placing some lines and curves on empty space, you feel connected to a reality that is much more complex and chaotic than your own.

    Chaos is not always a villain, we came into existence from the cosmic chaos that keeps on expanding beyond our reach. Maybe that is the purpose of all of this, evolving slowly to witness all the chaos that unfolds all around us and watch it in awe, how it gives birth to worlds that are beyond our touch but a starry night away. There is a poetic touch to all of this, I feel.

    Maybe this poetic touch is what makes us not ponder too much the futility of it all. Every moment feels so real and keeps on pushing us to more dusks and dawns that we love to witness. Every dusk is followed by dawn, every end is another beginning. We don't know if it is true, but we love the poetic touch of it.

    It may not be grounded in reality, all that we feel, perhaps all of this is a random collapse of a system that we can never comprehend, and we are nothing but a speck of stardust that looks at the sky in awe and dies alone. But the truth is, art doesn't have to be real. Art is about what something makes you feel not about the exact depiction of reality.
    Like, starry night. Starry night isn't an exact replication of reality, it is not a painting of what Van Gogh saw, it is a painting about what he felt in that moment and that is what makes it so special.
    That is why we need art and artists, to feel that depth of existence that we always yearn for. To feel and connect to the poetic touch that is hiding in plain sight in the mundane part of our days and nights.

    What is art, I often wonder. To be able to feel something, something that's so simple and pristine beyond our senses can gently decode, but so hard to explain why it is that you feel that way.
    When Byron wrote,
    "She walks in beauty, like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
    And all that’s best of dark and bright
    Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
    Thus mellowed to that tender light
    Which heaven to gaudy day denies."
    you and I don't think about the same person, yet it makes you think about something, something that feels so personal that it skips a heartbeat.

    Then there is a someone. Someone that fits so well with our messy nights. It is always the nights that you feel more connected to, certain tranquility that makes you more alive. A poignant touch of reality that is so calm that you can finally collect all the pieces that feel so disconnected, and place them on the cold floor.
    Then there is someone, someone who places their hand on top of yours and tries to connect the missing parts that lie naked on the floor. It is these moments that make you realize that existence is not suffering, but a certain feeling that only a few can understand on some nights like these. Feelings that you can rarely wrap around with the right words to tell the world, but deep down feel so real that you feel like you belong.
    Then there is someone, someone who feels like art in its purest form, few lines, and a million metaphors. Someone who feels like home.


    I love how broken this feels, each block of letters so disconnected from another ranting about a reality that isn't yours but a stranger that you don't even know about. But here you are, following every line and curve on a screen looking for something. I won't ask you what it is that you're looking for, it may not make sense to many, and it is not supposed to make sense to many, art is special that way and I know you would understand.


    how to write a poem?
    I often ask myself this
    same question,
    each time starting anew.
    umpteen words and
    uncertain feelings, they
    come and go
    in silence.
    fragile like a rusted door
    waiting for a push to open,
    a new world awaits.
    more words to form
    more rhymes to thrive
    I'll gather them around
    and ask this,
    am I close enough
    or still far away
    to write a poem
    to feel the world?



    #justamidlifecrisis

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  • branthan 7w

    when you start stripping down
    all the colors and all that's
    left are some blacks and whites.
    you find all the shadows
    falling behind some
    inconspicuous corners
    of an unlit room.

    you feel your skin touching
    the final stroke of solitude.
    you breathe in and out,
    exhausting every bone
    to catch up with this monotony

    but I'm feeling like a human today
    is that okay?

    I have this disease of falling
    in love with everyone and everything.
    I let 'em borrow a little part of me
    to fill their broken facades and
    now i live in pieces, scattered
    around places and people
    beyond my reach.
    maybe I am dying too.

    but I'm feeling like a human today

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  • branthan 8w

    World. The world is too loud, and it's getting worse day by day, louder. Even when it's 3 am where you put your xm4 to shut the noise out, it keeps banging your head, screaming. If this was a perfect world, we should not be even existing in the first place. All of this should have been nothing, not dark, not light, not void but nothing. I wonder what would it feel like, to be nothing. Stripped away from this materialistic and spiritualistic lie to be part of something unknown. A reality that we still haven't dreamed of. We have this habit to fill empty spaces with new things, from empty carts to empty rooms to the void that you feel inside with a stranger.

    Crowds. I have noticed that the world is getting crowded. There are more people on the streets, vehicles in a rush to be somewhere. Every moment the six feet of space is filled with another dream, new faces, new sounds, new noise. It is a scary thing sometimes, the idea that there are a thousand more dreams waiting to replace your six feet of space when you fall. It is strange, how we feel claustrophobic in an empty room and lonely in a crowd. Maybe all of this will fall someday, tumble down like a sandcastle and drown as if it never existed. But we are in a rush to be somewhere.

    Death. My dog was sick, I don't think he worries about death like we do, even though he is made to survive as long as possible. For me, death is this absence of something, something so personal that it's hard to explain to someone else why it is that you miss someone or something. I miss the cute noises my cat used to make whenever he dives into the Whiskas even when he was full. He is part of the soil now, every part of his existence slowly disintegrating into things that aren't alive, paving the way to new life.
    Death is this absence of familiarity, a touch, a smile, a text, a voice, long pauses, late nights, the way you used to feel... Sometimes it is a scary thing, not knowing the exact moment when you feel the absence. But we romanticize about it, the late nights when it is not so scary anymore because the warmth that you feel is so personal, like the waves that always come back to the shore.

    Meaning. It's such a wonderful thing when you think about it, how the dead things collectively come together and become alive. Alive, to feel the happiness, the sadness, the pain, the suffering, and then the inevitable death to go back and disintegrate into dead things, waiting to be alive again. This part of you that is alive carries memories of this universe, the journey from the big bang through the vast emptiness to finally settling down on this planet. From some chemical reactions on the ocean to single-cell organisms to apes to our ancestors. We carry the footprints from the past, past we have never seen but deeply connected to. Perhaps that is why some of us feel a deep connection with the ocean, a sense of tranquility about the waves that feels so personal. I wonder you feel the same.


    #justamidlifecrisis

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  • branthan 9w

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  • branthan 10w

    How do you tell someone that you want to die? Would you write few lines on a white sheet, ink stained against your skin or would you leave without a word?

    On a cold December night when no one is talking, when the world is silent that you can hear yourself clearly for the first time in a while. Or maybe on an autumn eve when the sky bleeds away into the ocean for the last time. A tranquil kind of solitude.

    It isn't sad, death is death, an end is an end. Nothing more nothing less. Yet, we carry certain things that don't belong to us a little longer than we are supposed to. Like, stories of someone that made you smile for no reason on a night like this.

    Do you think about death too? I wonder.


    I have learned that we have to make peace with the mortality, the fragility of existing. One day you're here and then you're not. But, there is happiness, around the edges of your favorite book that you keep coming back to, warmth around the curves of someone that made you feel like something more than this, this mere existence where you struggle to wake up.

    I think what makes life worth living is death, the unpredictability of existence. You don't know when the story ends, you don't know the destination but you walk through days with a hope that there is a tomorrow to wake up to. It could be your brain playing tricks on you yet it feels so real, feels so personal.

    I think when we comprehend this unpredictability, we will realize how important every moment makes you feel because maybe this moment is all there is. You don't know if this moment is your last, the last kiss, a hug, the last poem that you're ever going to write, last meal, last conversation, the last smile, the last moment where you could feel the life. A few moments on this tiny planet, alone but never lonely.

    I know people but I don't. It's a contradiction. Maybe the right thing to say is, I know part of them, some pieces from broken conversations that I can barely remember. I wonder they know about me too.

    #justamidlifecrisis

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  • branthan 10w

    Days have been getting colder lately, and it's becoming more evident that death is the only certainty that we have about the world. What happens when you die and no one there to see it? What happens when you die and no one there to miss your memories?
    But, what happens when you're alive and no one there to see it, no one there to share what you feel, no one there to hold a hand, no one there to jump from a cliff to ice-cold water below and survive, no one there to get drunk on cheap alcohol and laugh about how fucked up days are getting? What's the scariest thing? Death or living?

    There is this sense of helplessness about existence that we rarely ponder about, yet we walk like we know the destination.

    I wish I had an answer, I wish I had a lot of things, but I wish I had answers to a few things. Sometimes, answers are more meaningful when you know the right questions to ask. But, in a way, the meaning is meaningless isn't it?

    Let me ask you a simple question. Why are you here reading this? Of all the things that you could've done, why and how did you end up here reading this? What is it about the words that keep you come back for more? Are you looking for a connection like the other person reading this at the same moment, someone that you don't even know but feel the same as if there is something hidden in reality that's bringing you closer to something that you're not even sure of? A bleak sense of belongingness amidst the chaos to feel a little something? Or maybe you had a few minutes to kill reading some random things because you've got nothing better to do.

    Now that you are conscious about reading this, are you aware of all the functions that are happening inside you making you aware of how you ended up here? Every single neuron and chemical reactions inside the brain, that gets activated to make you understand the nature of reality.

    We are aware of the existence but completely oblivious to the mechanics and nature of existence.

    Reality. What does that even mean? Whatever you perceive, you perceive through your sensory organs and your brain, a complex computation involving neurons and the way they are connected, and a bunch of chemicals that result in a certain understanding of the world around you. This means that the specific way in which you see anything is always subjective. Therefore, you can never, in any way, reach any objective reality, since all objects are available to you only through their interpretations you perceive.

    You exist in these narratives that the brain creates for itself. Why these stories and not something else? Perhaps, it is the most optimized way to navigate the world around or it's the fun way. It explains our obsession with the stories, not just the ones from the books but the ones everyone around us carries that ends in some late-night conversations that feel so personal.

    Who are you then, if not this machine that takes input from the world and tries to predict what happens next? A mere moment of existence in the grand stage of things, that lives a short life only to wither away into the soil as if never existed. I'm trying to understand what it means to be alive, perhaps because I'm a creature of contradictions.

    I question my atheism sometimes, maybe, mid-twenties can do that to you. Trying to find a purpose, a greater meaning, has always been the core of human evolution. All those memories and instincts buried deep inside our DNA, resurfaces on nights like these. It's strange, even after all the logical reasoning and possibilities, how we find comfort in some prehistoric bunch of lies. We always had a thing for stories, right? But the question still remains, why we exist at all.

    Our universe is 13.7 billion years old, if our calculations are right, from the big bang to this exact moment. One way to see it is the fact that the universe took 13.7 billion years to mold you into this existence. Another way is, you're here now and you won't be here after a few more years. People romanticize how the universe is fine-tuned to sustain life, all the fine-tuned parameters to make your existence on this tiny planet. I love how ignorant we are, still thinking that the universe revolves around us.

    We don't witness the beauty of the universe, only a few ponder about it and ask the questions that lead to more questions and a few answers. Most of us are stuck in this routine to survive another day and some wake up to a tomorrow and some leave behind stories for another day.

    We are the way we are because the physical system that we are embedded in has these properties, if these values were a bit different we would have evolved differently or never existed at all and there could be a parallel universe where that is true. Like an electron, given a choice, it divides itself, creating copies and choose every option, creating different realities. Our existence is just a byproduct of these values, a simple emergent property of the system. Does that make life any less special? Meaningless, probably, but beauty is our subjective perception of the world, and for me, that is the most elegant thing about existence, life.

    perhaps, we live and die within people.
    as memories, in a stranger, at two am
    when the whiskey hits in the right spot.
    perhaps, a few lines on a bright screen that
    reminds them of something they lost.

    it is strange, isn't it?
    in the end, we are nothing but some
    random memories on some strangers' minds.
    living a life beyond eulogies,
    and withered flowers on the tombstones.
    an immortal life till the time strips away
    the stories from the mere mortal minds.

    I feel like we are ghosts chained to these mundane laws, decaying like the opaque buildings that we live in, and that is why we try so hard to find meaning to this existence.
    How can you ever comprehend the meaning of it all? How do you know that you're real and not mere imagination of a writer's mind? A story that they got bored in the middle and rushed it to an end? Maybe I don't exist at all, I'm just an extension of your weird imagination, a simple narrative that you created for yourself for some reason that you had no control over, and me, this, everything around you is just the brain playing some tricks on you. Can you tell the difference?

    The more people you talk to, the lonelier it gets. It gets harder to keep up with their stories. All of the favorite colors, songs, things that make them happy, or sad even the deep dark secrets they chose to tell you at two in the morning.
    Maybe you'll fall in love, maybe fall out of love, get married to some stranger and live a little longer, and die, or you could get hit by a truck tomorrow and die a horrible death. If I die today, at this moment, you'll never know, a few will miss the memories for a few days and it slowly fades away into the noises of the world.

    That is the only certainty about existence, death. You don't ponder about death even though it's inevitable and lurks in the back of your head, you are somehow wired in a way that makes you want to survive. You don't think too much about it, even when days are mundane that you jerk off to the same thing you've seen yesterday as a zombie trapped inside a nihilistic eventuality. Words don't carry truth, they carry sound often filled with a smile - a hope a facade. It's all grey, the days the feelings the mundanity that you're forced to follow. So, words fail you as you type and speak about how the days are going, how your life is going. The truth is that the clock makes the same sound, tick-tock, tick-tock, you wake up to the same thing with the memory of a yesterday that no longer exists and you are one more step closer to the inevitable entropic death. You don't know when or how, but it's the only certainty in this chaos. The truck in a hurry on the right side of the road, or the one that speaks about poetry and stars at late nights, one way or another it always finds you.

    One day the sun will die too, everything that you know now will cease to exist. The world is drifting apart, faster than light can touch, in a way. The sky that we see today is the memory of the universe, stories from the past that no longer exist and drifting apart, but kept on traveling and became a part of our existence, part of our stories. Soon, in a few billion years, there won't be many stars for you to see in the night sky.
    The universe does not care about what we understand about its existence, we can only try to untangle the stories to find the ones that we can comprehend.

    There could be some life at the edge of the universe, somewhere so far away on a distant planet just as lonely and lost as we are looking at a different sky and wondering about us, never knowing about our stories and our obsession with the way light touch a part of ourselves that made us wanderers.

    Someone told me about how infinities are tiny little things that you fail to see, maybe that's why asking for meaning is futile in the grand stage of things. We exist because we exist, the meaning is just our subjective experience of these tiny little infinities around us that makes you wanna wake up tomorrow that we do not know about.

    this numbness that you feel
    at two in the morning,
    is the collective insomnia of
    everyone that looks for answers
    at the strangest times.

    as the clock makes another sound,
    you're one step closer to uncertainty.
    we search through the endless nights,
    for a definite answer to kill the pain,
    but it finds abode in the weakening heart.

    of all the why's and the what's we
    couldn't figure out, I wonder how
    some colored pills found the right way
    to happiness

    perhaps, we've become some ghosts
    chained to the mundane ways,
    getting rusted, decaying like the
    opaque buildings that we live in.

    #justamidlifecrisis

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