You find yourself there sometimes. Three in the morning, in the bathroom. The only light is that single, merciless bulb over the mirror, the one that shows you every crack and every goddamn failure on your face. You’re pulling at your hair, your knuckles white, and you’re doing that silent scream, the one where you open your mouth but no sound comes out, because you’re afraid your own soul might hear the disappointment in your tone.
And you ask the stranger in the mirror the questions.
“What the fuck have you been doing with your life? How old are you now? What about all the compromises, all the little pieces of yourself you traded away? What did you miss by settling? What is this goddamn path you let them lead you down?”
You ever feel like you fucked up somewhere, a long, long time ago? Like you took a wrong turn in the dark and you’ve been living the wrong life ever since? A bad version. A cheap copy. The life you were supposed to have, the one where you were a man… that one is gone.
You used to think you were going to be someone. Someone that people cared about. Maybe do something important, something that left a mark.
But here’s the fact of it, the hard, cold truth you see in that mirror at 3 a.m.: there is a version of you that died. And you didn’t even notice it happen. There was no funeral. No grand goodbye. It just happened slowly.
You stopped chasing the things you once loved. You let the world, with its loud, stupid, sensible voice, convince you that your dreams were unrealistic. That “settling” is just part of growing up. And without even realizing it, you took the best part of yourself, the part that believed life could be extraordinary, and you buried it in the backyard of your own goddamn soul.
You tell yourself you’re just being practical. That you’re adapting, doing what’s necessary. But deep down, you feel it. The cold, hollow emptiness of a life that’s safe, but not truly lived. Every day you spend ignoring your passions, ignoring your purpose, that other version of you, the real you, drifts further and further away.
The tragedy isn’t that he’s gone.
The tragedy is that you let him go. You killed him yourself. You chose comfort over courage. You chose routine over risk. You chose the quiet, slow death of a paycheck over the loud, messy, beautiful business of being alive.
So you stand there, under that merciless light, and you ask yourself the final question.
Are you really alive? Or are you just existing?
Because the life you’ve been dreaming of, the one that other man was supposed to live, it’s still out there. It’s waiting for you in some dark alley, in some strange city, at the bottom of some bottle of cheap whiskey.
The only question is, will you finally get the guts to go after it before it’s too goddamn late?
