Tuesday, 20 January 2026

How Many Lines Make A Circle?

A circle is a straight line.


And no I won't be taking questions. 

Because today, I am your geometry.


A straight line is just an idea 

that still believes movement is progress. 

Straightness is impatience; 

a refusal to stay long enough to learn its own shape.


Civilisation loves straight lines. 

Roads. Borders. Spines. Deadlines. 

Anything that points forward so no one has to look down.


Arrows calm the anxious. 

Mirrors force them into cognition.


So we drew time straight — 

years marching, 

history advancing, 

tomorrow behaving. 

Anything to avoid noticing 

how often we return to the same damage 

wearing better grammar.


But we didn’t begin as straight lines.


We began curled. 

Warm. 

Circular. 

A question with no direction. 


A foetus is a circle;

no hierarchy, 

no ambition, 

just becoming 

without justification.


Then gravity arrived. 

And then, grammar. 

They pulled us upright and called it evolution.


Stand straight. 

Walk forward. 

Look ahead. 

Grow a spine. 

Pick a side.


The first violence was posture.

The first betrayal was obedience. 


A circle is not what time is. 

A circle is what we abandon to survive.


Time does not bend.

Time does not return.

Time does not care if you scream.


Time happens. 

Once. 

With the indifference of ancience. 


What repeats is behaviour. 

What circles is explanation.


They call it history

when patterns survive

because no one names them.

They call it tradition

when repetition feels safer 

than surviving obsoletion.

They call it progress

when the same mistake walks in

wearing a tie, a crown, a dress, a smile.


You don’t move through time. 

Time moves through you — 

a straight line forced through a mind 

that keeps folding itself back into comfort.


Capitalism understands this perfectly. 

That’s why it doesn’t sell endings. 

It sells continuity.


Desire. 

Acquisition. 

Disappointment. 

Upgrade.


Not a loop, 

a line you bend yourself around

until exhaustion whispers:

“This is destiny.”


They call it healing 

when pain becomes useful. 

They call it enlightenment 

when resistance gives up politely. 

They call it maturity 

when you stop asking who benefits.


Pause.

Breathe. 

Take a minute.

Now. Think about it.


Notice how none of this felt unfamiliar.


That’s because belief doesn’t arrive as truth. 

It arrives as recognition, spoken slowly, with good posture.


You didn’t argue when I said a circle is a line. 

Because I asked for obedience.

And, you obliged.


That is how conviction works:

not by proof,

not by reason,

but by exhaustion, by surrender,

by the slow accumulation of fear

draped in coherence.


A sentence repeated cleanly enough 

starts sounding ancient. 

A lie aligned neatly enough 

starts feeling earned.


Say it again. Inside.


A circle is a straight line.


It still holds. 

Not because it’s correct, 

but because it’s coherent.


And coherence is more dangerous than being right.


Time is not circular. 

Time does not care.


We are the ones who keep returning — 

to habits, 

to harm, 

to versions of ourselves 

that felt simpler 

when we were smaller and curled,

unsullied by gravity.


The circle is the shape we remember 

from before responsibility broke us upright.


A circle is a straight line.


Not because it’s the truth, 

but because 

standing still in a curve 

would mean admitting

we chose this posture, 

we chose this direction, 

when we could have remained otherwise.


And somewhere in you, 

something ancient, 

curled and quiet,

is still nodding.

Still counting fingers. 

Still bleeding.

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