There is nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the lights were on. Fear doesn’t conjure demons—it just reveals the ones we’ve always carried. And somewhere along the line, I thought that walking headlong into the dark made me brave. That testing my limits—physically, emotionally, existentially—meant I was overcoming something. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. But with time, you start to see things differently.
You learn that bravery isn’t the leap—it’s the crawl. It’s the quiet decision to keep going when everything in you whispers to stop. Because in reality the scariest thing isn’t actually the risk. It’s the repetition.
I used to love the stars. Still do, I guess. Not because I think they’ll save me, but because they lie so beautifully. Because they let me pretend.
Pretend that things last. That people last. That moments don’t slip through our fingers like sand, no matter how tightly we hold on.
Stars are dying, always dying. Flaring, caving, collapsing. But they don’t show it—not from here. From here, I can believe in permanence.
And that’s all we’re doing, isn’t it?
Pretending. Clinging to the illusion that there’s meaning in the pattern, that the center holds, that things don’t rot and memory doesn’t fade.
After everything—after all the versions of my life I tried to live, after all the masks and reinventions and the desperate search for a self that felt real—I find myself wanting to sink into silence.
Not because I’m broken.
Because I’m tired.
And because stillness feels like truth.
In the end, it’s never the grand things that matter.
It’s the chipped coffee mug. The way someone said your name. The sound of laughter in a room you forgot you loved. The smell of old wood and rain.
All the things that “didn’t matter”
—those are the ones you’ll miss the most.
But still—I get up.
I get up, and I keep pretending.
Because maybe that’s what hope is.
A beautiful lie we tell ourselves
until it becomes true.
