May Live, May Not Survive

I may or may not

have memories from before I was born.

Mostly administrative footage.

Ceiling fans.

Doctors.

Rubber gloves.

Someone saying,

“Congratulations.”

My soul visibly trying to leave the room.

I may or may not

be a reliable narrator.

Memory is just gossip

the brain spreads about itself.

Every year,

my childhood changes details

like politicians changing ideologies

before elections.

At this point,

even my trauma

contains factual inaccuracies.

I may or may not

have a personality anymore.

After years of survival,

all my opinions feel like hostages

developing Stockholm syndrome.

You call it maturity.

I call it

the slow extinction

of original thought

under fluorescent lighting.

I may or may not

be hallucinating adulthood.

Everyone explains taxes to me

with the exhausted confidence

of prisoners describing weather.

“Bro, this is just how life is.”

Which is historically

what people say

right before revolutions,

murders,

economic collapse,

or arranged marriages.

I may or may not

have been in love.

Hard to tell honestly.

Loneliness is incredibly talented

at voice acting.

Sometimes the heart

doesn’t miss people.

It misses

who it became

when someone was watching.

I may or may not

believe in honesty anymore.

Every conversation now feels like

mutual advertising

disguised as intimacy.

Authenticity itself

has become a marketing strategy.

Even spirituality arrives

with podcast microphones,

thumbnail expressions,

and early-access discount codes.

Enlightenment, apparently,

is available at 30% off.

I may or may not

be mentally ill.

The problem is,

once self-awareness

becomes performance,

even breakdowns start feeling rehearsed.

I once cried genuinely

and immediately thought,

“This metaphor could work in a poem.”

That’s not healing.

That’s capitalism

occupying the nervous system.

I may or may not

hate civilization.

But I do find it suspicious

that we created skyscrapers,

satellites,

quantum physics,

and biryani,

yet still lose arguments

to men whose display pictures

contain sunglasses inside cars.

Evolution clearly

has loopholes.

I may or may not

fear death.

What scares me more

is surviving long enough

to become motivational.

Imagine suffering for decades

only to end up posting:

“Good things take time.”

That phrase alone

should disqualify people

from having political opinions.

I may or may not

want children someday.

Not out of love.

Mostly curiosity.

I just want to watch

a smaller human being

stare at existence

with the same betrayed expression

I currently reserve

for salary slips.

That’s not parenting.

That’s intergenerational field research.

I may or may not

be losing my mind.

But the world keeps behaving

like a group project

where nobody read the instructions

and the dumbest person somehow

became team leader.

Wars.

Riots.

Algorithms deciding relevance.

Teenagers learning confidence

from airbrushed existences

that look AI-generated

even in real life.

Every day now feels like

God accidentally sitting

on the remote control of reality.

Channels changing mid-sentence.

Natural disasters between advertisements.

Genocide sponsored by children’s charities and wellness campaigns.

I may or may not

have written this poem.

Maybe insomnia did.

Maybe accumulated disappointment.

Maybe thirty years

of overhearing adults

confidently explaining things

they clearly never understood.

Or maybe consciousness itself

is just the universe

developing anxiety

after becoming self-aware.

Who knows.

At this point,

even humans feel less like an actuality

and more like

a conspiracy theory

with excellent marketing

and no measurable proof of intelligence.