I often think to myself, about life and its natural progression. 

Some people say life has a rhythm, a pattern, a purpose. Birth, growth, love, loss, death—it's all part of some grand design, or so they claim. 

But what if I don't see it? What if I don't feel the rhythm, don't recognize the pattern? Does that make me flawed, or does it simply make me honest?

It's strange, this idea that life must have meaning. Everyone seems so desperate to attach something to it, like a child clinging to a balloon, afraid it will float away without a tether. Love, success, legacy—they're all just strings we tie to the balloon of existence, hoping it won't drift into the void. 

But what if a person doesn't have a string? What if they've let the balloon go and watched it ascend into the sky until it was nothing but a speck?

Does that mean he—I'm seeking death?

It's a thought that—as I have started to grow old—has began to unsettle me, though I can't quite explain why. 

If life has no meaning, no anchor, then surely death is its logical conclusion. To stop the flow of time, to step off the relentless treadmill—wouldn't that be the ultimate freedom? And yet, I don't want to die. 

The very idea fills me with an emotion, a subtle but tangible clenching in my chest that feels primal. Why? If life is meaningless, why should death be any different? What is it I'm clinging to?

I wonder if this is what it means to live in a paradox. To exist in a state of contradiction so profound that it reveals itself if you stare at it too long. 

Life is meaningless, but I don't want to die. I don't want to die, but I can't find a reason to live. It's a loop that spins endlessly in my mind, each thought chasing the tail of the last, like a snake devouring itself. 

Am I Ouroboros, trapped in a cycle of self-consumption, or am I simply human, caught in the impossible geometry of existence?

That said, the funny thing about paradoxes is how they demand resolution, even when none exists. The mind hates contradiction. It seeks order, logic, clarity. And yet here I am, living proof that some questions can only ever be answered by living them.

Perhaps that's the paradox itself—that the absence of meaning doesn't negate the experience of living. That even without purpose, life unfolds, moment by moment, like pages turning in a book I didn't choose to read but can't seem to put down. 

Or maybe I'm just overthinking it. Maybe life is just life, and death is just death, and the rest is noise, a futile attempt to impose order on a universe that thrives on chaos. But even as I think that, I know I can't stop myself from asking, from wondering, from trying to find some thread, however thin, to weave through the fabric of existence.

Because at the end of the day, that's what it means to be human, isn't it? 

My thoughts were interrupted as the brillaint white light flushed the impenetrable darkness around me—the darkness that smothered me for an eternity, and a half. The slick sensation of my sensitive skin brushing against something that felt like warm elastic was fleeting as a pair of hands wrapped around my head and yanked me out of the cluttered space I was imprisoned in. 

A bombardment of colors rendered me unable to see, however, I was able to feel—the warm layer of wet warmth on me, the sound of three people conversing in a language I was unable to understand, the metallic stench and the familiar sterile cold. 

I willed my eyes to open and a few tens of wooden planks tied together came into my hazy vision.

"Goo-goo-gaga." 

Hm? 

Why do I sound like that?