rot within
In the hours before dawn, the world reveals itself to me. It is never still, always shifting beneath the surface. The air carries the scent of soil and decay, yet I walk through it feeling lighter, stripped of other people’s expectations. I no longer worry about what I should do. I think only about what I want. People speak constantly of kindness as if it were sacred. I see it as an old weight they choose to carry. They believe shared suffering creates some deep bond. When they see someone struggling, they feel obligated to act. I see a person in need, nothing more. I can help or not. That choice is mine alone. It is not cruelty. It is honesty. The earth itself teaches this better than any person. It gives and takes without apology. Floods rise, then retreat. Water breeds life and ruin in the same breath. Old structures stand as reminders of forgotten rulers, yet even they are temporary — useful until they are not. The rivers do not mourn those they swallow. Why should I pretend to carry sorrow that is not mine?
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Staying open and soft to everything eventually means losing yourself. You dissolve into the group, mistaking emptiness for connection. I have watched it happen. People share their pain like currency, believing it makes them good. I choose differently. I take what I need without guilt or performance. Wanting something does not require loving it. Power does not require pretending. Still, there are moments when I feel something real. When the lights fail and people sit together in darkness, pretenses fall away. There is a raw purity in it — flesh and blood meeting without expectation. The sound of rain on rooftops feels ancient and true. In those times I am not fighting the decay. I simply exist inside it.
Some will call this view monstrous. They need monsters to feel safe in their own goodness. But those labels are inventions. I am neither rebelling nor performing. I am simply myself, moving through a world that shows its truths plainly if you let it.
What remains is a quiet way of living: taking what you need while protecting what is yours. Walking through the streets at dusk, ash and dust rising with each step, feeling neither good nor bad. Just present. Just honest.
The crows understand this. They circle above the waste without remorse or poetry, taking what sustains them and leaving the rest to rot.
