Solitude is tearing up books in class, while the teacher turns a blind eye;
Solitude is a late-night heart-to-heart with an unsheathed utility knife;
Solitude is the countless hesitations behind the railing of a windowsill;
Solitude is the bitter medicinal powder, barely swallowed down with thick yogurt;
Solitude is treading upon the evening glow, walking past a thousand newly-lit lamps, and stepping into the nether gloom;
Solitude is the drafts upon drafts of suicide notes piling up in the drawer;
Solitude is going to the cafeteria alone, day after day;
Solitude is weeping, begging your parents to spare you;
Solitude is the torrential downpour that drenches you.
Growth is born in the depths of solitude; he makes solitude understand just how insignificant others are.
Growth shatters the glass bottle brimming with tears, savors the peeled-off scabs, and tells solitude:
Only you are inseparable from yourself, bound to fulfill your own yearnings, born on the selfsame day and dying on the selfsame day, knowing each other’s every thought.
Growth is living, while solitude is ceaselessly thinking of dying the very next moment.
I hold tightly to my past self, while the future leaves not a single trace.
Embracing the golden setting sun, growth pulls solitude—shrouded entirely in a haze of bleakness and sorrow—up from the black mire, only to watch, powerless, as solitude wrenches free from his hands.
Just an assigned prose piece the teacher asked for after we studied “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, I suppose
Recorded on January 27, 2022