The Ledger

I weigh things. I don’t know why I’m like that now, but the change did not come gently, not with some soft-lit epiphany; I woke up one day already in debt, door already open, collector already inside.

This is not a philosophy, it's a survival mechanism. And I didn't choose it - it chose me... somewhere back in the wreckage, when I learned the hard way that energy spent on the wrong thing doesn't come back. It just doesn't. You don't get refunded for the hours you burned caring about someone who was never going to reciprocate it, or the nights you spent dismantling yourself over something that was already dead the moment it was born.

So now I calculate. Swiftly, indiscriminately, without mercy…for myself or for anyone else. What is this worth? What will it cost me? Is there anything left on the other side of this exchange? Or am I just pouring myself into a cavernous, bottomless, hole?

Most things don’t survive the audit. I’ve looked at what I called sacred and found it wanting: people, years, whole decades of my own belief —- and I don’t feel powerful saying that. I feel like someone standing in a collapsed house, still holding the wrong measurements, wondering why it took so long to notice the walls had tumbled down.

The few things that pass, I can’t trust them either. A thing can balance the books for years and still fail without warning, the way a heart just stops beating (or stops keeping promises it swore it would honor for eternity). Nothing that survives is safe. It’s just still standing, still upright, for now.

That's the nihilism, if you want to call it that. Not the performative kind, not the aesthetic kind people wear like a jacket. The real kind, the kind that comes from actually doing the math and realizing most of what we call “life” is filler: noise dressed up as meaning, obligation dressed up as connection. I see through it now and I can't unsee it, and there's no relief in that, only a low, constant ache, like a tooth with no pulp that still throbs.

I’ll be a husk eventually, that part isn’t in question. What’s still undecided is what gets to take the last of me before I get there: the few things that do pass the test, they pass it completely. They're not just worth something, they're worth everything, and I will bleed myself dry for them without a second thought, because I know exactly what they cost me to find. That's the anguish underneath it.. I'm not detached because I don't feel. I'm detached because I've felt too precisely, too many times, and I know now what it costs to feel wrong about something.

So call it a weight, a value, an equation, a wound that learned how to use an abacus.

I don't care what words you put on it.

It’s the only thing between me and the version of myself who used to think everything deserved anything, anything at all.

& I don’t know if I’m better for losing the old “me.” Maybe that model was just the beta.

I just know the space where that person stood is still empty, nothing’s filled it, and I’ve stopped expecting it to.