How often do we choose a thing…
over a life that breathes?
Trading meaningful connection,
friendship and love.
It’s not a choice.
It’s a slow poisoning,
a self-inflicted disease
that scratches the walls of our bones,
addictive as cigarette smoke in a closed room,
consumed not by hunger,
but by the hollow echo of someone else’s dream.
They sold us the craving.
They wired our palms to crave the shiny,
the new, the unfeeling.
What you keep,
what you hoard in glass cases,
in digital caches,
in closets that smell of dust and regret,
is not treasure.
It is the skeleton of meaning,
dressed in plastic skin.
A thing has no heartbeat.
No memory of laughter.
No warmth left in its fingers.
It exists for one purpose:
to be discarded.
To be swapped.
To be replaced,
by the next shiny ghost
that promises to fill the hole
the last one left behind.
We collect remorse like seashells
on a beach we’ll never walk again.
We erase a voice that knew us
before we learned to perform.
We delete a text,
a call unanswered,
a hug ungiven,
as if love were a draft,
and not the only thing
that ever truly outlived us.
You will never know.
I will never know.
What her voice sounded like
when she wasn’t angry.
What his eyes looked like
when he wasn’t scrolling.
What silence felt like
before we filled it
with notifications.
Filters blur the sky.
They turn sunsets into filters,
laughter into memes,
touch into a vibration.
The gut knows the truth,
but only if the mind stops screaming
long enough to listen.
And the big picture,
is not a photograph.
It’s the smell of your love’s pheromone.
The gentle hand in yours.
The way the light falls
on a mug you drank from
together,
and never thought to photograph.
We are alchemists of the soul,
turning breath into bandwidth,
love into likes,
presence into performance.
We hoard the dead mass,
the unopened gift,
the unread letter,
the phone full of photos
no one will ever see again,
and call it security.
But in the after?
What do you carry?
Not the thing.
Not the screen.
Not the brand.
Only the quiet.
Only the ache.
Only the ghost of a touch
you forgot to hold onto.
I wish,
oh, I wish,
we’d all step barefoot into the grass again.
Let the wind sting our cheeks
like it used to.
Let the coffee taste like morning,
not like caffeine.
Let the silence between us
not be empty,
but sacred.
Happy new day,
reader.
May your hands find something real today.
May your heart remember
what it means
to be held,
not liked.
Not saved.
Not scrolled past.
But here.
Now.
Alive.