I got drunk in front of my family tonight.
It wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last.
I am a flicker in the universe—a summer firework in Japan, brief and fading. Some might remember it as a good thing, in fragments of distant memory, but it is never relived. Never real again.
How do you carry the weight of the world when defiance is your only compass? When existence itself becomes a betrayal of your ideals—abandoned, worn thin from years of compromise?
There are so many masks I wear, so many faces for survival. I have grown used to them, accustomed to slipping between roles. There’s the polite face I use to mask disinterest, the one that nods along in conversations I’ve already left. The face that conceals where I once studied math, for fear of being boxed in as that tired, soulless caricature: the emotionally stunted "nerd," who cannot grasp the warmth of human connection. And then, there’s the face I wear at dinners with government officials—an empty mask that agrees, quietly, that socialism is our salvation, though I don’t believe it, though it scratches at my soul every time.
At some point, the mask fuses to the skin. Removing it is not freedom but pain. I’ve lived a life so layered with small, necessary deceptions that I no longer know where the lies end and I begin. If I peel it all back, what remains?
Oh, what a pathetic existence.
A little too guarded. A little too aware. A little too earnest in wanting something real. The harder I try to build genuine connection, the more I see the world as cruel and cold—a place where those who reach out are the ones burned first. The hedgehog’s dilemma in its purest form.
Thinking about it makes me sick. Surely this is the last sad imagination of a man lying on his deathbed. But no. I am still here, and once again, I feel the weight of existence.
I grew up in this cold city—a place my geography textbook called subtropical. A lie. The chill always seeped into my bones, and it wasn’t until ten years later, smoking in that same deceptive climate, that I realized the world was always cold.
I’ve smoked in colder places since then. In cities far from here. Sometimes with a rare soul, one of the eight billion faceless shadows plaguing this planet, who felt almost like a kindred spirit.
We stood on the balcony once, sharing a cigarette. He told me—without hesitation—that he had many regrets in life. His words hung in the cold air, dissolving like smoke. I wanted to ask what they were but didn’t. Some things are too sacred to unearth, even between kindred souls.
Tonight, drunk and smoking alone, I feel that same cold seep back in, and I think of him—not with longing, but with an ache that words can never fully carry. A fleeting moment, a shared defiance against the heaviness of the world.
I wish I had spoken more. Not to confess or reveal, but just to stay a little longer in that fragile stillness, when everything was as it should be. I admired his recklessness, his honesty. The way he faced life with all its bitter sharpness.
If life were a little kinder, I might have told him that rare souls like his should never be forgotten. That even now, I carry that night like a talisman in my pocket, feeling its weight whenever the world turns cold again.
Tonight, the wind bites like it did then. And though the cigarette burns to its end, the memory lingers longer than the smoke.
I miss you, my partner in crime. I hope to revisit you in your colder city and the stars are kind to you, as they did me dirty.
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