It is a terribly sad moment in one’s life, when they realise the innocence of their childhood is lost forever. What can we do in our strange existence on this planet to rekindle those fantastical, wholesome joys we knew so well as little babes? Inevitably, the sordid reality of adulthood falls upon our soft heads, like a torrential downpour of horror, and awakens us into the harrowing truths of human life: that all love is conditional, that we are truly alone – especially so in large numbers – that death is inescapable and often preferable to life, that cold and lifeless logistics govern the nature of our strange incarcerations on earth, and that a different version of ‘you’ exists within the mind of every single person who has ever encountered you, and so ‘you’ – as you know yourself – is not evident to anyone but you; this is true loneliness and our shared dire fate.
How sorrowful; to drift, from the fantasy fairy tales and folklore of children’s books and bedtime stories, into this desperately sad reality. Unlike some, I don’t believe I can recall the exact moment my childlike innocence was lost, it occurred more so like a powerful wave in the ocean steadily collects garbage and trash or rubbish and litter, as it rolls on and on, picking up more and more, slowly becoming more contaminated by the second, until it’s composed more of waste than water, at which point it ceases to be a wave containing waste and becomes waste containing water, as I am now a being composed more of trauma and horror, disgust and despair, than humanity, trapped within the squalid skeleton of a sentient yet soulless creature, navigating this matrix of cold concrete, blindly yearning for a pure kingdom of heavenly unity with all, knowing the probability of such a place existing to be far inferior to the overwhelming likelihood that what awaits me after life is the same form of existence I left behind when I was born, endless nothingness, a vacuum of inanimate unconscious non-sentience. Alas, why be philosophical anymore? It is but hyper-flammable fuel on the blazing fire of my grave realisations.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou