You know why fictions make bestsellers?
Because grown-ups need lullabies
that don’t sound like lullabies,
stories that sterilise the wounds
life keeps reopening with its dirty hands.
Because you want a plot
to babysit your fear of randomness,
a tidy universe where consequences arrive
only after clearing their throats
and asking if it’s a good time.
You want heroes and villains
stacked like steel tiffin boxes:
neat, labelled, thermally insulated
from moral ambiguity.
You want arcs with airbags,
sorrows with safety protocols,
despair with a callback number
you can threaten with lectures on moral science.
Because fiction launders
the sewage of living
into metaphors you can tolerate.
Life never achieves that;
too clumsy for poetry,
too honest for symmetry,
too drunk to walk a straight narrative line.
You want closure
because your brain cannot sleep
next to an unresolved question.
You want definitions
because life gives you people instead;
blurry around the edges,
perpetually out of focus,
shuffling motives
like a broken deck
missing all the clean cards,
as if stitched together
from the leftover half-lives
they never learned to inhabit.
Fiction gives you the idea of control —
a way to pretend the chaos has choreography,
that pain has a blueprint,
that someone, somewhere,
is keeping accounts
of all the nights you broke quietly.
Fiction lets you believe
there’s a reason behind ruin,
a design behind disaster,
a god behind grief,
even though you know
every deity is just an elaborate apology
for our terror of meaninglessness.
But the truth is smaller,
darker,
and closer to the bone:
You don’t fear chaos.
You fear recognising
your own fingerprints
on the ruins.
And that’s why you buy the lie:
because it’s the only version of truth
that lets you sleep
without negotiating with the monster
you are, but refuse to call yourself.
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