I’ve died a thousand deaths in this world. Not the dramatic kind with last breaths and final words, but the quiet kind — the type that happens when you’re staring at your bedroom ceiling at 3 AM, wondering if the universe mixed up its cosmic mail and delivered you to the wrong address.
The world, I’ve learned, isn’t consistently cruel. It doesn’t always match your tears with rain or sync thunderstorms to your breakdowns. Sometimes it’s almost kind — like a friend who doesn’t quite understand your pain but brings you soup anyway. But most days? Most days it feels like an oppressor, a professional dream-killer with a PhD in crushing spirits.
That’s why I dream of space. Up there, maybe the stars would play hide and seek with me, even from light-years away. Maybe the sun would warm me without burning, and comets would streak past without destroying everything in their wake. Perhaps the universe would love me the way I’ve always wanted the world to — unconditionally, without the fine print of expectations.
Here’s the thing about hating the world: it makes you feel guilty, like you’re being ungrateful for breathing. Because even on days when the world feels like it’s got brass knuckles, it still manages to pull off something beautiful. Like that sky — oh, that goddamn sky.
I was in my room that day, where the fog creeps across the floor like unwanted thoughts. My mind was a broken record of “I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying” — trying not to crumble, trying not to break, trying to keep my mind and heart and soul from spilling out of my chest like an overpacked suitcase.
Then my friend texted: “Look at the sky.”
And there it was — blue and pink painted across heaven’s canvas like God’s own watercolor set. The air tasted like childhood memories, like my grandmother’s sliced apples shared on sunny afternoons. For a moment, breathing didn’t feel like a chore. My lungs didn’t threaten to collapse, and my bones didn’t feel like they were made of glass.
But here’s the cruel joke: even as I stood there, bathed in that perfect sky, my hands were shaking. I felt like an imposter in nature’s art gallery, like this masterpiece wasn’t meant for my eyes. How dare I look up when I’m so busy falling apart? The thoughts kept pounding: I’m less than I dreamed, less than I planned, less than the future I once imagined for myself.
New pain layered over old bruises, like a Jackson Pollock painting of trauma. This skin used to be unmarked by life’s disappointments, but now? Now it’s a map of everywhere I’ve tried and failed.
Yet that sky was beautiful. Even if it wasn’t painted for me, it made me stay. And maybe that’s the most tragic love story of all — how the world can never hate me enough to kill me, but I die a little every time I try to love it back.
I keep dying in this world, over and over. But like a stubborn flower growing through concrete, I keep finding reasons to bloom — even if those reasons are just moments of blue and pink splashed across an indifferent sky.
For all of us who keep loving a world that doesn’t always love us back.