The Next Time

By Cyril Joseph

Hello you! Welcome to the frontlines. I know you have been waiting long, so let’s get right to it. By now, you should be familiar with how it all works, but I wouldn’t blame you for being lost. I understand that this is a lot to take in. But that’s okay, and here’s the good news - you have forever to get it right!

We can do this over and over, as we always have. You can mess up, wallow in sadness, and break things down. You can destroy it all and start over, and no one will be the wiser. You can live it up with glee, you can build, connect and be happy. Either way, as for all the paths you choose, you will grow. You will adapt and learn to accept the things that come your way, which you’ll conceive on a scale of good to bad. And sometimes, you will even push towards a few things. You will gleam with enlightenment, and if you don’t, you will learn to be okay with it. You will revel in happiness, and if you don’t, you will normalise sadness.

They say life doesn’t give you things that you can’t bear, but that’s a crock. Life has given you shit and shown you unbearable magnificence. It has exposed you to grief and joy, hard times and good ones, but you made it through. Unwavering, insatiable you!

But here you go again, trying to quantify the entropy and make sense of the vastness of this disorder. I would like to reassure you that it’s all random, but causality will contradict that. I would like to soothe your spirits with balance, but you know better than to believe in it. So all I have left to sell you on is your learnings, a fragmented evolution that you are too close to see.

In hindsight you will always know better, and that’s not an unwarranted coincidence. Even when your memory fails you, and your instincts defy logic, the next time, you will know.

By Cyril Joseph