A collection of fish are washing

Through the cosmos

Their tails sending stars adrift

Their eyes dotted with orbs

As they swim further into the galaxies

They pass through comets

Dodging asteroids along the way

Ripples in spacetime sends them off

Will they ever find us?

The humans that watch them

From afar, we see their elegance

To only hope we find them tomorrow

Again, swimming in the waters of our pond

On nights like these, when the crickets are chirping away, hidden from my eyes, I am often alone in contemplation after a day of meaningless meandering. I often feel a sense of loneliness and a hole of meaninglessness even as nature soothes my mind.

I do not know what I want from life other than an escape from this oppressive hopelessness and meaninglessness. As I have grown up, it feels, as one old friend put it, as if I am adrift, anchor-less, in the world.

It seems to me that I want more from life, but reality was not made by the true will of the people. It was made to serve the distinct interests of the powerful, settling for change only when the bloodshed is too much for the eyes of the rulers. A part of me thinks this yearning is a selfish desire for greatness, for attention. I yearn to be a part of something important, something heroic, something that is able to change the world in a way that brings a better tomorrow. It feels both childish and primal. Wanting to matter and be considered important and influential may be my mind telling me that I lack connection, that I am wandering the world with many thoughts but barred from many entryways—the most important of which lies in the matters of the heart.

Perhaps it is the desire for greatness that dooms me to obscurity. I can write the greatest essay in the world, but such ideas mean nothing if they pass through deaf ears. It means nothing if there is no way to share in life the triumphs and frustrations that resonates with me. I can sit here and critique every attempt to improve the world and to point out every issue, but what is the point if we are living in a state of paralysis? Words are so easily written, but what about building up endeavors in reality?

To change the world feels like pushing against this oppressive mood that pervades all my relationships. Somehow, meaning and change became entangled in the foundations of my sense of connection. To counter a cynicism that feels too accurate for our times is a desperate cry for community and solidarity and survival. Without meaningful community, each of us dwindles. Each of us suffers. Each of us find ourselves confronted with meaninglessness and hopelessness somewhere in our minds.

It is hard to feel optimistic in the face of so many barriers, to hope that there can be something different, when our trust for each other has fallen so low. I falter to reason that humans can truly go beyond self serving goals—after all my own desires for change and meaning is for the sake of wanting to fill the hole in my heart of feeling disconnected from others and feeling a looming nothingness in the face of everything. How can one transcend such selfishness if the world actively bares down upon you to crush you, to desecrate what you hold dear, and to mould you into the obedience that people find, after many years of toiling and injuries, is most comforting and of least resistance? I can understand why people fall into cynicism. It is far easier to accept defeat and to tend to the small garden of our narrow lives than to try to tend to the greater arena of life’s most pressing problems.

I wish, most of all, in my selfish heart, that I can meet people who understand, without needing much conversation, the world like I do, while offering an uniquely complex alternative to the stale cynicism that has comfortably settled in. Such demands feel unreasonable, and at times, futile. The peers who relate see how much is constrained by a lack of coherent camaraderie. Many blame it on the economic systems, but I bitterly wonder if there are enough people of strong character that could create a new system that is not more vulnerable to corruption as the one we have now.

I feel a sense of tiredness, of wanting to stow away from the world and to never encounter it again. I feel a sense of arrogance to believe that I know better than most, but the more I engage, the more this arrogance is fed. It is how I perceive what entails progress being possible that disappoints me when I see the imperfections of of what exists.

Without people committed to each in unison, without a desire to sacrifice and genuinely work towards the wellbeing of each other, without understanding and passionate loyalty among members, without patience and tenacity to draw bridges, without a shared creed, we find ourselves going no where and scattered everywhere at once. But to create such conditions lends itself easily to cultish behaviors and groupthink. It’s far easier to inspire and coalesce around easy to understand and emotion-laden maxims than to seriously engage the mind. This is in part because each of us are biased and find ourselves divided by trivial differences. One can combine together a powerful force in temporary emotion, but it often does not last as these differences become obvious.

One most be loyal to basic principles of compassion and care for the other, to being willing to see the core humanity of each person and respect such, not by a matter of emotional manipulation, but as a matter of independent reflection and introspection, through both humbling personal experiences and through the waves of empathy that moves one’s heart towards wanting to alleviate suffering. One must see loyalty as fighting for the same principles but also in the hard and difficult work of balancing being as critical of ideas as the most cynical elder, to test each proposition in the flames of rational discussion and debate endlessly, while still being open minded as a child who is idealistic and eager to learn. One must be both aspirational and practical, with foresight and with humbled hindsight, with both steadfast beliefs and a willingness to change. One must be willing to stand with the group, but also assert their independent thoughts, to be empathetic and emotionally attached to each member but yet capable of emotional distance to ideas and criticism.

To achieve such balance, is, furthermore, not static. It is dynamic. Just as a team needs to know when to charge in to the fight and when to fall back depending on the circumstances of each battle and the methods of the opposing team, so does thought and action require adaptability. No situation is ever entirely the same just as one is never the same stepping into the same river. A well seasoned team may use similar principles to gather intelligence and to plan, but each battle fought requires instinct and adaptability to address the weaknesses and strengths that appear instantaneously on the battlefield. Likewise, one idea for one situation may not be wise in another. Knowing when to apply and when to go with another option is an exercise of timing, thought, trial and error, and luck.

To pull the heart and weave its strings while retaining the cool of the mind is to ask for a kind of enlightenment that goes beyond the current wishes, desires, abilities, and willpower of most people. This is where I feel the most arrogance in my cynicism. We are faced with such great expectations and requirements and responsibilities, but I severely doubt the capabilities of our world to truly create such conditions among most people. This is not because of personal failings or inadequacies—no. This is due to the sheer amount of resources and effort required to craft an individualized experience that guides all citizens towards all of these traits. I see our education system, riddled with inequities, trying to hobble towards this goal, and I see the forces trying to corrupt its force for selfish greed. I have doubts about my own abilities to be able to achieve such, so how does one reach for something beyond one’s own capabilities?

There might even be disagreement about the vision I have set forth. An easy protest is that some people are truly too bigoted, too discriminatory, to be a part of the conversation. I agree, as a closed heart and a closed mind often go together, but we must balance cynicism towards bad faith actors with openness that some people can change if they are willing. It may be difficult to know the difference, but without hope for change, we will never carve at the root issue, merely chopping away at the easily visible leaves that regrow so quickly.

Perhaps, in our imperfect world, one must plan for imperfect progress that often falls backwards as a feature rather than an unplanned inconvenience. One must use imperfect tools and imperfect solutions, but I doubt the lasting change that can happen if we devolve into believing that the ends justify the means. A corrupted consequence done in the name of justice will never truly be justice for all as it merely creates inequities in new forms and in other ways just as releasing new predators into the wild to cull a pest will eventually make a pest and hazard out of the now overpopulation of predators.

I do not know where to start with these desires, ambitions, and needs for something better, but I take some solace in writing them out. Knowing that I have a clearer end goal in mind allows me to establish, in my world, what it is that I truly yearn for. In an ideal world such would be common to find a person who balances all. It would be as if I am at home in knowing that others look out for me while inspiring me to grow. I can only hope that one day, in the far future, someone else will experience the joys of such a world. That is what I can hold onto for the future.

When I see my face in the mirror, I see the stoic mask I wore to hide from my mother. I see the sadness and grief that carved my mouth into a permanent resting frown. I see my eyes, and the stare that looks absent. I see my history of pushing people out, and desperately trying to keep my emotions in.

It’s a face that says “stay away” and even the smiles seven awry because it’s fighting against the weight of the past.

It is my life that I see in the mirror.

It’s me.

Time and time again

The vessel that holds our lives

Falls apart

In surveying the damage

You see the center crack that runs

Far right and then

Jeers to the left

You see the broken ridges of

People lost and gone

How the slices of memories

Damage your heart

What is left behind

Is where life spills out in grief

Still

Tenderly, as you would

You pick up and mend

Even as life runs away from you

Even as the shards hurt

Even as the past bleeds out

What is left is never the same again

Tending to the wounds is honoring

The past that never was

As the gold shines through the brokenness

Bittersweetness life is held

Where everything fell apart

The center holds

Just one more time…

It’s easy for them to feast

To gorge

To take

To lay their greed filled eyes on

Those golden rays of Dawn’ early light

Broken by the pillars of glass and steel

Separated into a thousand corners

Blocked by the walls of power

Only in the few windows of high

Does light fully reach the eyes

Of bottomless darkness where nothing lies

But that is not to them the light belongs to

Even basking in the alleyways of democracy

Walking next the refuse of the world

One can see that it belongs to the People

A commandment held high by the sky’s steeple

As hard as they may try to shroud the world

As strong as their buildings may be

As insidious as their violence is

No leader, no priest, no hired man

Can turns the rays away

So that we may not have Day

Even as the light fades at Dusk

When hope seems gone and

When the vicious feeding begins

By the moon, by the stars, they sing up high

Truth and power never astride

The light still will arise

I lounged my body on my bed and sighed. Time droned on and washed upon the mountain of depression that was weighing me down. Everyday felt like a dark haze covering my mind, blurring all my memories into one feeling of ennui.

The days of the pandemic were ticking by on my calendar, and I was scrolling through the now infamous blue bird social media when I came across it.

Against all of the giant waves of existential emptiness, against all of the burning fires of bitter derision in the background of my country, and against all the caves of loneliness that we, as a world, were wandering lost in, a single beam of light pierced the fog and struck my heart.

Here in the darkest and most painful moments of my life, ascending up from the mindless and endless scrolling beneath my fingers, appearing from the void of internet content—a single ship sailing the turbulent waters of an Earth dying, a noble warrior against the tides of vitriol and hate—came a sight so beautiful, so eloquent, so emblematic of the feelings of our times that my breath was taken away.

Behold! Suddenly roiling down the flood waters of a street came a testament to the female power of resilience. It was so brave, floating down the water. With such poise and strength, it made the world stop and look. On its last harrowing journey in this world, it carried a message to the besieged world. Sacrificing itself, only the blessed onlooker knew what holy and final message this pot carried:

“This strong and independent biryani Ain’t need no Man”.

I found her body on the bed that I laid.

Her hair was as long as I remembered it.

Her smile still honest as it once was.

Her dreams of waking up and seeing the world at dawn still a wish tucked away for tomorrow.

Her breathe still able to feel the chill of winter morning and feel the sharpness of each draw on her exposed lungs.

Her eyes still eager to spot the birds flying high in tandem on a fall afternoon.

Her skin still filled with music shifting through her body.

Her life extinguished itself, and although.

I recognize her, and I wonder who she is, what she could of been if not for the void that consumed her.

The crystal spirals

Falling slowly

Into the echoes of Space

By the dawn of Beginning

Rainbows refract in the dew drops

of Infinity

Meeting at the tick of

Eternity

Apart they form and

Only on the beat of Zero

Do they sing

Another existence

Not for us

But for the infinitesimal tomorrow

A parabolic paradox

Feeding itself through the End

A divine dragon

Howling a consonance into life

Dissonance drawing ripples

Across Time

Fractals formed

From the touches of notes

Merging with Reality

Colored melodies

Drawn onto the strings

That tie together

Forces in perpetuity

Conversing as one

When I was in the inpatient unit for the first time, the most startling aspect of my experience was not that a woman barged into my room with delusions that I was her sister. It was not that there were white supremacists talking about the race war. It was not that the veteran I was talking to knew about Eisenhower’s interstate highway project. The most surprising aspect was that in the inpatient unit, everyone there is truly equal. Few places carry this feeling, but the feeling is a mix between despair that everyone is equal in suffering and loss and a strange sense of camaraderie that the people who you are with understand you on a level the doctors and nurses never will. I never felt judged by the people who I talked to, even by those way older than me.

Despite the visceral repulsion I have to being in the inpatient unit, I do sometimes wish I could spend time talking to the people there. Each person I met had an unique story to tell. Each person faced unbelievable obstacles. I wish I could find them now and dedicate my time in getting to know them more, writing down their stories, and helping them on their own healing journey. I don’t have a desire to become a therapist or a counselor or a nurse or a doctor because the power differential makes it hard to have an honest conversation. I want to be a peer, another person in recovery, rather than a distant figure proclaiming cures from afar.

Stigma runs through our culture, but I think it’s a badge of honor to be a survivor. Adversity changes who you are to the core, but in doing so, it ruptures old beliefs so that new beliefs can grow. Compassion and gratitude can be what replaces what can never be found again. The people who enter the inpatient unit often have faced adversity that the average person will never know, but their strength is incredible. To step forward everyday, even while everything seems lost, is a sign of incredible willpower in the face of pain. I’m proud to call these people my peers. We are not “crazies” and “psychos”. We are not weak nor cowards. We are distinctly—and fundamentally—human.

When the fire elementals of Aeros are first brought into the world, an earthly flame is lit in a glass bowl on the beaches of their homeland. Shaped into being by the youngest priest of the order, the glass bowl becomes the vessel in which a new elemental will arise. Over nine nights, the young priest blows into existence a perfect bowl with its own fire breath. Decorated with the images of an unique story, each glass bowl represents the history, the aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the collective of elementals. The elders then gather to whisper the blessings of the ancestors, and from the ashes of those who came before, the runes that call forth life are drawn into the sands.

The magic that flows forth from the communion of the fire elementals is one sung through song. The occasion is reported to sound ethereal and otherworldly to the human ear, echoing for hundreds of miles, but, sadly, ever since the Great Flood, the number of fire elementals have dwindled so much that the song can only be faintly heard to those close by. Once begun, the song must be finished till the break of dawn or legends say that all will fall apart.

In the song of the fire elementals, the music is able to mould the fire into a distinct being filled with the combined emotions and character of its singers. As the music rises, so does the flame. As it bellows deeply, so does the flame bend softly in response. As the notes become light, so does the flame become joyful. As the notes becomes dark, so does the flame become weaker. Each member sings in its own unique voice and history. Often times, as one member sings the stories of the losses of the people, another may be singing the dreams of a better future. While the flames are drawn distinctly with the piercing calls of anguish, it is also melded into unity with the solemn harmonies of hope.

From this music, the flame grows and morphs. All throughout the night, the infant is sung to until it begins to grow so hot that the glass it encases begins to melt. In order to be born, the flame needs to channel its energy into melting down its protective shell and pushing outward into the cold air. It was this particular night that the birthing process was difficult as storm clouds grew near. The elementals grew unsettled and their music became shakier as they realized they chose the worst possible night to bring a member into life. The elders had made a mistake in their predictions of the sky.

The presence of fear spread immediately. The melody, losing its luster, grew darker and more discordant. The flame reacted instantly and started to recede, crumbling in on itself. The ritual can only happen once every century, and it seemed like this was a disaster. The elders cursed themselves with deep booms of grief. This was the end for their people, they sang. The adults pushed in response with rolling waves of despair, their anguish making the flame turbulent and chaotic. It was only the youngest priest who kept on singing with brilliant force. As a single voice among the darkness, it sang higher and higher, breaching the center core of light, and reaching towards heights that it never reached before.

The others watched as this young voice sang with the passion and hope of its own short life, against all the pain it was witnessing among its people. It heralded the deepest convictions and sang with redoubled effort as the storm clouds came nearer. Against the background of thunder, it spun the magic of the flame into existence against the pain. At first, it was just one voice fighting against the darkness, but as its voice grew more bold, the others saw its resolution, heard its call for something greater, something better, and they started to harmonize with its own daring heart.

The elders, having almost given up, saw this change spreading, and each felt a deep stir inside. With each voice joining in, their sorrows began to lift. Could this be the realization of their oldest prophecy? Their voices began to shift, blossoming into anticipation and determination. The Aeros will not die here, no. Here, they will make their final stand. With nothing left to lose, the group soared upwards with the melody of everlasting strength.

Just as the first drops of rain began to fall, the glass shattered and from the middle came into the world the Phoenix. Singing with heavenly beauty, it flew upwards and ignited the skies, pushing the clouds back in an explosion of flames, just as the first rays of the sun peaked over the horizon. The elementals watched in awe as the Phoenix wove together hallowed laments with unbridled joy, announcing to the world the miracle of its own birth.

The Aeros would be saved—nay—reborn. As the Phoenix circled around the beach, it shed its tail feathers and everywhere it landed, a new flame elemental would arise. On that day, a hundred new elementals would arise from the ashes of its feathers. The elders and the adults stood paralyzed by the beauty of the miracle it was witnessing. It felt like each moment was an eternity realizing itself in front of them. A hundred elementals in a day rather than an eon.

When the Phoenix finally gave up all but one of its feathers, it bellowed one last chord of harmony and burst into flames, dissipating into the dawn. The single last feather floated down to earth and landed onto the sand before the youngest priest. The song was finished, and when the stun of silence was finally over, the Elders knew they had much work to do to teach the many new members of their group the ways of the fire elementals. As they shepherded the new members in renewed hope towards their home at the base of the volcano, the young priest stayed behind. Facing the sun, the young priest held the feather in prayer and with sadness said goodbye.

When the adults asked where the youngest priest went after the song, the elders knew. They found the feather on the beach, and carrying it carefully, they placed it on the top of the volcano, where it blew up into the sky to never be seen again. On certain nights, however, the new children of the Aeros will hum a tune in unison, and the new legends say the priest could be spotted at the top of the volcano singing in ever-loving response.