Words Left Along

It’s, what feels like, five minutes to the hour. 2025 will have come to an end and 2026 will take its place without fanfare in my book. I wonder what it is that 2025 taught me.

 So many of my memories, as of the last four years – hell – even the last 28 years, feel less like the past and more like half assembled figments of someone else’s story. When I try hard enough I can remember something with enough familiarity to say it’s my own, but in an almost dementia-like fuzz, they still are estranged from me. So many of the things that I’ve come to shape myself from feel as if they have lost weight in my own mind. Experiences, emotions, lessons, all of it, lost in a haze of muting and miss contrast.

Its with twisted feelings that I examine this part within myself. One part feels as if the storm has come and past, repairs and preventions made, and the anxiety of what if, no longer has its yin. Yet with the loss of its own yin, it refuses to let itself cease to exist. I’m not sure how to feel about this. How would a baby feel good about things being calm when it was born during a war? Where bombings were the lulling rock, air raid sirens the melody of status quos. Where is my peace when status quo was fire and hell? 

I’ve been thinking about Tolkien and his writings lately, specifically the lord of the rings series. Although it’s been mainly in effort to use his last words between Frodo and Sam as a way to formulate my own goodbye to XXXXXX, it hasn’t been until now that I’ve seen another connection. Like his dwarfs in the hobbit series, I too feel that I’ve dug too deep. My mine isn’t rock, but it is my own mine and the nature of things in which I feel I’ve dug to deep. 

It’s been said that if you stare long enough or hard enough at something you can learn something that was once unseen. Though I don’t feel as if I’ve seen the unseen, but I do feel as if I found myself lost in a depth where I can’t return. In this field however, unlike mathematics or other sciences that try to explain the how of the universe, to question the why comes with what I can only aptly say is, “cognition hazards”. 

Unlike the dwarfs, my digging never exposed anything so rare that it called out across the lands for beings to covet. No, in fact, this knowledge, this understanding has only stripped away the comfort of ignorance and laid bare my flesh for branded reminders. Exposed among others, my brandings create my own reasons to isolate, but to those who see, revolting revelations scream untold horrors to their souls. Mental leprosy, is the cognition hazard I own. Not because it itself is bad, but because it’s not meant to be seen. 

I am: the witness to the unseen, the leprosy of cognition, the truth of what life really is.