The Blank Canvas
As I stood on that balcony looking over the city, the chilly wind felt nice against my face, and the gray sky felt right; I was in London, after all. The buildings stood like giants, their silent gazes fixed on me as I stared back at them. I looked back inside and saw my friend was still asleep. So I decided to light the joint without her. Puff, puff, up went the smoke, and I wondered, would the smoke join the clouds, becoming part of something greater? Or would it drift alone, rejected, forever distinct? The thought lingered, blurring the line between what belongs and what doesn't. Belong to what? My mind and my consciousness were just fucking around, probably THC doing its thing. When I looked down at the city again, it looked more somber, matching the storm of thoughts forming in my head. See, I was staying in the hood, and as I looked down the street, I could see some homeless people and some tents. As I looked further, I saw that the buildings got nicer until you arrived at those glass and metal skyscrapers. It made me wonder, how did we end up here?
Everything I saw, as far as I could and beyond, was only one of infinite outcomes. Each one resulted from humanity's combined choices. What if...? So many what-ifs! The fact that so many possibilities will never come to pass made me sad for those in which we realized there's enough for everyone to live a decent life with all the universal basics like having enough to eat, good education, and health coverage. But what's universal? Everything is debatable; the truth is dynamic and changes culturally, socially, and scientifically as we learn new things. There are as many perspectives as human beings. I felt like a damn Epistemological Skeptic, a freaking Postmodernist, a damn Fallibilist—we are fucked! It's all designed to fail! Could life be like a game with some hidden treasure behind all the ugliness—a kind of reward for those who can see beyond what's obvious and find meaning in the chaos? Could that same fact be used in the other direction? I keep hitting the same wall: happiness must come from a way of looking at things. It is as if we are all painters about to start new work where every thought and every action adds a stroke, a color—creating something unique even if we never see the whole picture? Could it be that life is just like...
"Jomi! You have that gaze again! Get out of it! We need to get ready. I have an idea; we need to buy a blank canvas!" I couldn't help but start laughing. She was up, and we had to go. As we stepped out, the smoke from the joint still lingered in the air, just like those endless possibilities. Maybe life really was about keeping the brush moving, knowing that meaning came from the act itself.
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