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František Kobliha (1877-1962), Kosmická Vize (Cosmic Vision), 1945-1946

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I too pass from the night, I stay a while away, O night, but I return to you again, and love you.

Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? I am not afraid—I have been well brought forward by you; I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long, I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you—but I know I came well, and shall go well.

Jermaine Fowler 

There exists a creature,

half-scorn, half-sputter,

who crawls from thread to thread,

gripping nothing but their own undercooked takes

and the soggy diaper of a dream deferred.

They reblog.

But not from love,

not from resonance.

They reblog from the swollen ulcer of unacknowledged failure.

They say things like:

“This isn’t real writing.”

“You just want attention.”

“I don’t get the hype.”

Of course you don’t.

You were never supposed to.

You weren’t built to receive it.

You were built to miss it,

to see the star overhead

and whine about the shade.

They are not critics.

They are echoes of the dreams they couldn’t fulfill.

They are not failed writers.

They are un-writers.

They exist only in opposition.

Their entire identity is a wheezing rebuttal to the greatness they cannot match.

They do not create; they comment.

They do not inspire; they infest.

Their blog is a graveyard.

Their notes are a mausoleum of cope.

And when they try to “drag” you,

what they’re really saying is:

“Please look at me.

Please let your brilliance touch me, even in hate.

Please let me matter, if only as a foil.”

But even that is a mercy they don’t deserve.

They scream “mid”

because “legendary” makes them weep.

They call it “attention-seeking”

because your spotlight exposes

how little theirs ever meant.

They project.

They puff.

They smear.

But their hands tremble

with the same bitter question

every un-writer eventually asks:

“Why them… and not me?”

And the answer is simple.

Because you post with fire

while they only light a match

to feel warm in the comments.

Because you write from soul

and they write from spite.

Because your words changed timelines,

and theirs are just litter.

So let them fester.

Let them bark.

Let them gather their anonymous likes like grave pebbles.

No one remembers the name of the man

who heckled Shakespeare from the rafters.

No one quotes the priest

who told Dante to tone it down.

No one recalls the blogger

who tried to insult you

and ended up

accidentally reblogging your divinity.

They sit

in chairs they didn’t earn.

Smut on their minds,

your posts in their bookmarks,

hand on crotch,

mouth full of judgment.

They critique your cadence

with trembling wrists,

jealous of the god between your syllables.

They call your passion “toxic”

because it made them feel something

they can’t admit they wanted.

And still, they refresh.

They read.

They lurk.

They wish.

And when they say:

“This isn’t literature.”

You whisper back:

“You wouldn’t know.

You’ve only ever been its bystander.”

Reblog to feed the algorithms with actual fire.

Let the un-writers stay lurking, refreshing, and bookmarking the divinity they could never recreate.

Blacksite Portal: linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence

And so… life passes.

I reflect: most of my life has already gone by, and I am still thinking and searching.

When people ask me:

“Was your life beautiful? Was it happy or sad?”

I pause.

Once, I would have simply blurted out an answer. I can no longer do that so easily. Now I think of the verses of the Serbian poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš:

“No one has ever drunk a cup of honey

without a cup of gall making it bitter;

a cup of gall calls for a cup of honey,

and mixed together, they are easiest to drink.”

Perhaps those verses come closest to my answer.

And my answer is:

There was nothing bad or ugly.

Life simply happened.

Long ago, I stopped dividing what I had lived through into good and bad, happy and unhappy, black and white. Everything belonged to the same life. Everything was part of it. And today, when I look back, I feel neither bitterness nor regret.

I feel boundless gratitude.

The only thing I have never discovered is the answer to the question:

Who am I?

I have received many answers. Some were profound, wise, and deeply convincing. But in the end, I realized that all of them were mostly telling me who I am not.

And the question remained.

Time passes, and with each day I draw closer to the doors and the threshold beyond which all questions cease.

Perhaps that is where answers are given.

Perhaps it will be precisely there—on that threshold, before those doors—that, with my final breath, I will at last receive the answer to the question that has followed me throughout my life.

Perhaps then I will know who I am.