#strange thoughts

You wake up, drink something that isn’t chaos, your thoughts aren’t sprinting for the exits..

and you think, "oh. this is what okay feels like"

..and then.. footsteps. Not loud. Never loud. More like a rhythm you didn’t realize you missed until it starts syncing with your pulse again.

..and there she is. Not even doing anything dramatic.. that’s the trick.

Just existing like a glitch that learned how to smile, like she wandered out of a half-remembered scene you forgot you were still replaying.

..you don’t fall. That’d be easier. You tilt. Just slightly.. like a picture frame that isn’t straight anymore but you can’t tell when it happened.

Something inside creaks. Says: you were doing fine. And you are. You are. That’s what makes it interesting.

..because it’s not about needing her.

It’s about that feeling.. that sudden, electric

"oh no.. something in me just woke up again"

The part you tucked away so you could sleep at night without your brain writing poetry on the walls.

..she laughs at something small. You feel it land somewhere it shouldn’t have access to.

You think, "this is manageable"

You liar.

..now your calm has a shadow. Not a bad one. Just.. movement. A second current running under the first.

—

The inside voice leans in, conspiratorial: you don’t want to be ruined. You just don’t trust peace unless something threatens it a little.

..and there it is. Not chaos. Not love. Not even her.

Just you.. standing in your carefully built quiet, realizing..

*erhm*

People spend their whole lives trying to become interesting, which is funny, because the moment someone becomes interesting the first thing they do is try to look normal again.

Watch closely.

A person dyes their hair neon green, pierces their eyebrow, learns three obscure instruments, reads books with titles that sound like haunted furniture… and the moment someone asks them why, they say:

"Eh… I just like it."

Which is technically true.

But it’s also the emotional equivalent of hiding a dragon behind a houseplant. The truth is that humans are strange little narrative machines wandering around pretending to be furniture. We sit in coffee shops discussing the weather while secretly carrying entire mythologies in our heads.

Carl Jung noticed this and wrote:

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”

But awakening is inconvenient.

Because the moment someone wakes up they notice something terrifying.. Everyone else is improvising too. The banker, the bartender, the goth girl lighting a cigarette outside a club, the photographer crouching in an alley trying to capture the moment when a puddle briefly becomes a mirror.

Nobody actually knows what they’re doing.

We’re all just adjusting our hats and pretending the hat was part of the outfit the whole time. ='D

Because society is essentially a massive game of musical chairs played by philosophers who forgot they were philosophers.

We invented taxes, chairs, dating apps where people swipe left on someone who might have been the love of their life because the lighting in the bathroom selfie was suspicious.

Meanwhile the universe is over here quietly manufacturing stars out of hydrogen like a bored baker.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote:

“You have power over your mind — not outside events.”

Which sounds wise until you realize your mind occasionally decides to remember something embarrassing you said in 2009 while you’re brushing your teeth.

So the i propose a theory..

Maybe the point of life isn’t to become perfectly stable or perfectly wise or perfectly normal.

Maybe the point is to become precisely strange enough that the universe briefly pauses and goes "Ah. There you are"

Because every once in a while you see someone walking down the street and something inside you whispers.. oh.. that’s allowed..

And suddenly the entire social dance shifts half a step.

Which leads to the question.

If the person you are pretending to be met the person you would become if you stopped pretending..