Just another stranger...

Estranged in its toils and miseries, you are a stranger wandering its jagged, soiled streets, longing for a home you’ve yet to reside and a peace you’ve yet to encounter. The cold winter night clothes you with its harrowing comfort—sheltering you from the sun’s searing heat. Alas, it is the sun you truly seek, or so your heart assuredly whispers, but much to your dismay, your body can only take so much of the sun’s heat.

You realise you are weak.

After further deliberation you recognize there are untapped reserves of inner strength, dormant, lurking behind your simple, and yet most difficult of choices. That said, you realise in whose merciful hands you subsist, and in whose eyes your penitence will be readily valued—suddenly, the prospect of self-revolution dawns on you, for there is no alternative. No alternative but to stop the lie and stop trusting the illusion.


Is it your indecisiveness that torments you?
Could change be so simple? Choice.

Could there really be solace in the cold? If anything, you’ve been in the cold, perhaps far too long—you’ve felt its callous touch, stared deep into its deafening eyes, and swallowed its riddled promises. You can’t take it any longer, how can you? As you watch yourself butcher the few meagre remnants of your humanity—the spiritual guillotine you’ve submissively offered your neck to.

Others too, weren’t as foreseeing, they too readily forwent their souls, sparing it of life’s most prized choices, as though infants suckling the illusion, embracing the wretched mother that has no mercy over her child.

You are surrounded by such gruelling martyrs—they clutter its streets—theirs stories all so similar, of far-flung expectations and mundane dreams. They are strangers too, their eyes laden with regret as they mourn their failures. If you listen closely you can hear their faint, brittle cries, echoing past the ruptured chambers of their now hollow hearts. Peer then, into their furrowed desolate eyes, for past the dreary void you will find the root of their desperation, the least of which is a looming fate, a fate ever so crimson.

They chose to be strangers, not to this world, but the other.

Choice; a liability ardently sought by those who lack it, a gruelling burden to those who exploit and abuse it, and a lasting tribute to those who honour its temperament.

Now choose.