Cigarettes and coffee were the first rituals of consciousness. Not because they sustained life, but because they announced it. Each morning, they marked the crossing between sleep and awareness, between the dream and the demand of reality. The world did not greet us gently. It never had. We woke into chaos and learned to call it heaven and hell, two faces of the same truth, separated only by perspective.
Through the curved glass of our eyes, we observed a panoramic stage prepared long before our arrival. The environment felt intentional—assembled with care, or cruelty, or both. Some called it divine. Others accidental. To me, it felt like a personal metaverse: a constructed arena designed to test curiosity, endurance, and belief.
Life did not begin with certainty. It began with motion.
Like a stone flung by an unseen hand, existence skipped across the surface of the galaxy, touching down only long enough to leave ripples before being carried forward again. Each life was one brief skip, sustained by momentum rather than understanding. The galaxy itself refused stillness, expanding endlessly like a living canvas—paint that thought, light that remembered. Stars burst from it in violent blooms, igniting solar fires whose plasma gathered just enough warmth to cradle life while threatening to erase it entirely.
That was the first lesson: creation and destruction were never opposites. They were partners.
The stars burned with a kind of hellish beauty, and from that fire came ambition. We learned to build, to labor, to shape environments we named peace. But peace was always conditional. It existed alongside loss, grief, and the quiet knowledge that happiness did not endure. Joy was not eternal because it was meaningless; it ended because it mattered.
Death moved patiently through all things. It arrived with time, with hunger, with tooth and claw. Beasts older than language—lions, crocodiles, creatures shaped purely for survival—reminded us that morality was a human invention, fragile and easily broken.
Between man and woman unfolded another ancient struggle. The old stories named them Adam and Eve, but the pattern repeated endlessly: attraction entangled with dominance, love distorted by inequality, creation driven by desire rather than understanding. Humanity fought for happiness the way empires fought for land—by taking it from one another and calling the theft necessary.
To truly know oneself, or the other, required something more dangerous. It required recreating what was missing. It demanded the courage to search for what could not yet be seen.
Life became a forced playground. Comfort was offered, but creation was mandatory. Those we cherished marked the beginning of new chapters, and every chapter carried both promise and weight. We lived inside chaos filled with hidden truths, veiled from easy discovery. Understanding demanded loss. Growth demanded exile.
I imagined society as a hive: a queen's mind directing countless workers, each alike in purpose yet different in form. Order did not erase individuality. It depended on it.
At night, we stared upward like children—like small spiders clinging to fragile threads—wondering what lay beyond the stars. Was space endless, or enclosed like a terrarium? Was existence a snow globe waiting to be shaken? Time passed, or perhaps we merely agreed that it did. Time was an invention, a way to frame triumphs and defeats: a promotion earned, a love lost, a birth, a death.
Knowledge grew, and with it came identity. Were we heroes or villains? Background characters or protagonists? Angels, fallen beings, hybrids, or gods masquerading as mortals? Surrounded by endless belief systems, we struggled to choose a single truth. Was it deception to believe in one path, or arrogance to believe in many?
Paradise fractured into interpretations. A paradise of memory. A paradise of faith. A paradise promised after death. History whispered that the choice had already been made, written long ago in cycles and prophecies. A butterfly flapped its wings, and entire lives shifted course.
I saw no pure evil—only error trapped inside a paradise that had not yet learned how to release itself.
Earth moved through space like a weapon and a womb all at once. A flying vessel, scarred and powerful. Ideas arrived like meteors, granting power at a cost no one could predict. Power demanded wisdom, and wisdom exposed a truth we preferred to ignore: ideas shaped reality more than matter ever could. The one who named the idea owned the future. The rest vanished into obscurity.
Art appeared in collapse. In walls falling. In paint splattering concrete. In bodies sinking into uncertainty. Even a sea of floating rocks held meaning—some hollow, some burning, some absorbing heat so others could survive. Light was born from darkness, and darkness feared exposure, trembling at the thought of releasing life-giving air.
Yin and yang revealed themselves not as symbols, but as law. Safety bred boredom. Adventure opened the door to death. The grim reaper waited at every threshold, accompanied by its quieter cousin: sleep.
Dreams became loops. Engines ran until they failed. Bodies broke down—lungs lost pressure, muscles gave way, frames collapsed. And still, something lingered. A hum. A flicker. Fading headlights observed by strangers who passed without understanding.
The game redrew itself.
Life adjusted its strategy like a coach rewriting a plan. When one journey ended, another began. Beasts slept and woke. Worlds closed and reopened. A child entered existence crying, overwhelmed by memory and instinct, dropped into a garden poisoned by careless hands and unseen creatures.
Knowledge expanded until it threatened authority.
And that was when exile began.
When the creation believed it surpassed the creator, the response was swift. If you know more than me, the voice said, build your own world. And so the gates closed. The garden fell away.
Beyond the walls lay a foreign land. Once sweet, now barren. Fruits became illusions. Desserts rotted in the sun. Death smiled openly there, a predator disguised in bright colors, waiting patiently in a world where fun, fury, and fear wore the same face.
Yet even in exile, wisdom endured.
Where fear dissolved, power emerged. To stop clinging to the old world was not surrender—it was rebirth. To accept the unknown was to open the door to a new beginning.
And in that acceptance, life continued—unfinished, unafraid, and endlessly becoming.