Thoughts (The Weight of Knowing)

Isn’t it strange how the youth die young, as if each of us is born with a quota to fill— a finite ration of laughter and light, and once used up, we’re pulled from the stage? Maybe that’s why I’m still here. I never danced too hard, never ran too fast, never burned bright enough to catch the gods’ attention. Am I cursed to age endlessly, doomed by boredom, because I’ve kept fun at arm’s length, because I’ve steered my life by a darker sun? Or was I always meant for this— watching others flicker out like snapped matchsticks, while I sit in the quiet, untouched by flame? Do we each have a meter, ticking down, some ancient measure beyond our sight? Or are we just fragments of something bigger, or perhaps nothing at all—so tiny, so irrelevant, that we’re less than the sum of our own atoms? Maybe we were shaped by a stranger’s blueprints, invisible designs carved before we came to be, and now we stumble along grooves cut in stone, calling it fate, because it’s easier than admitting we were never meant to know the way. I used to think I made you in my image, that we sculpt each other, chisel by chisel— but maybe we’re all part of some sick chain reaction, each of us nudging the next into chaos. The gods—if they watch—do they care? Or are they exhausted, heads in their hands, tired of our stumbles, our blind destruction, the way we turn our own hands into knives? Or worse—maybe they laugh, watching us as they’d watch sparks burn and flicker, a brief amusement in the endless dark. And yet—who are we to complain? We’re aware, at least in fractured ways. Maybe that’s our final hope, a flickering candle in the void, the knowledge of something greater— or even just the possibility that we are so much more than we know. But why aren’t we those higher beings, those wise watchers? Is it possible we hold power we barely touch, sparks of creation stifled by doubt? Some seem to live by unseen codes, respect bound to their every move, while others crash and burn, unrestrained. Do they know some secret we’ve missed, some hidden path through the dark? Or are they just stumbling like the rest of us, answers slipping through their fingers like sand? Questions—endless questions— and no oracle to answer, no god’s ear to lean against and listen. Each of us shaped by others, bound by experience, our minds coded by what’s been whispered and taught, translated by some fractured part of ourselves. I wonder—if a soul came into this world alone, untouched by voices, untouched by hands, no sight of beast, or bird, or humankind, what would they become? Would they know right from wrong, light from shadow, or drift like an empty shell, free from all that binds, yet without the compass that makes us human? Or maybe the compass is the burden. Maybe knowing is the weight that bends our backs, and the ones who go young were simply lucky— never forced to ask the questions that have no answers.