I stepped out—for bread.
The rain, a silver needle, embroidering the diaphanous gauze of the atmosphere.
Thoughts, like feral hounds, prowled and dragged me
astray, to the wrong street.
And there—
the abyss.
No bread here.
Only the void, yawning wide, insatiable, ravenous,
a Grand Canyon, misplaced in the geometric monotony
of concrete blocks—a scar on the skin of the ordinary.
Who sanctioned this?
Who gouged this chasm into the fabric of the mundane,
this rupture in the tapestry of the everyday?
We inhabit a world where everything
appears to matter—
blueprints, ideals, the ceaseless scramble for triumph,
the Sisyphean climb toward some illusory summit.
But time, that insidious thief, that silent eroder,
dissolves it all into the silt of oblivion.
What endures?
Laughter.
Laughter—not mirth, but a gasp,
a surrender to the absurd, a white flag waved
at the futility of it all.
It is the sound of a man
teetering on the precipice,
howling into the void
and hearing only his own echo reverberate,
a hollow chorus of his own insignificance.
But nothing matters only
when you are solitary,
when the world contracts to the size of your skull.
No wife, no child, no anniversaries to commemorate.
No one to observe, to decipher, to adore.
Laughter then is not liberation—
it is the wail of the forsaken,
the cry of a soul unmoored, adrift in the vast, indifferent sea.
Imagine the edge.
The abyss below, fathomless, voracious,
its maw gaping, hungry for meaning.
You can shriek, sob, summon aid—
but no one answers.
And so you laugh.
Not because it is droll,
but because it is the sole retort left to you,
the last weapon in your arsenal against the void.
If we cannot alter anything—
if the gears of fate grind on, indifferent to our pleas—
why even endeavor?
Insignificance is not a curse.
It is a peculiar emancipation,
a shedding of the weight of expectation.
Your blunders, your trepidations, your aspirations—
they are sandcastles, ephemeral and frail,
washed away by the tide of eternity.
Yet there is splendor in the act of construction,
in the fleeting defiance of entropy.
Even stone crumbles.
Even the most impregnable bastions succumb to time’s relentless siege.
Laughter cannot nourish the famished,
cannot solace the lovelorn.
It is a spark, evanescent,
a brief luminescence in the abyssal dark,
a fleeting exertion to convince yourself
that anguish and torment are illusory,
that the weight of existence is but a shadow on the wall.
And it is, perversely, amusing.
