A name whispered twice—
Loud enough to fill the air,
Too hollow to hold.
He sat alone on a cracked wooden bench at the edge of an old train station. The wind carried the scent of rust and distant rain, the kind of smell that lingers in places long past their prime. His half-eaten sardine sandwich rested on the newspaper beside him, forgotten, the edges curling under the damp air.
A train rumbled past on the far tracks, not stopping. He watched the flicker of faces through the windows—some staring blankly, some lost in books, others pressing their foreheads against the glass as if waiting for something to begin or to end.
He wondered if they were real.
Or if they, too, were just words written by someone else, characters moving along a plotline they didn’t write.
There was a time when he had felt solid, weighty, made of flesh and hunger. But lately, he had begun to suspect he was becoming something else.
A sentence.
A phrase.
A collection of words that lived outside him, detached from the body that had once given them breath.
He spoke and watched his voice float into the air, unclaimed, foreign, barely his own anymore.
Was he the speaker, or just the sound?
A Life Trapped in Language
Most people think they are made of memories, experiences, the things they have seen and touched.
But what if we are only ever the words we leave behind?
- A man is not his actions, but the story told about them.
- A life is not its reality, but the way it is remembered.
- The more we explain ourselves, the less real we become.
He had tried to define himself, to write and rewrite his own meaning.
But the more he spoke, the more he felt like he was fading into the language itself.
Nothing is fixed—not beauty, not life, not even selfhood.
We are not statues.
We are not monuments.
We are shifting, unfinished, a draft constantly being revised.
And yet, we spend our lives trying to define ourselves with permanence.
But what if we are not meant to be defined?
Lessons from a Man Who Became a Word
- The more you try to explain yourself, the less real you become.
- You do not need to be understood to exist.
- Selfhood is not fixed—it is rewritten every day.
- A story is not true just because it is told.
- The most honest version of you is the one you cannot put into words.
A voice crackled over the old station speakers, announcing the next departure. He checked his watch, though he had nowhere to be. The ink on his newspaper had smudged slightly from the moisture in the air.
The train he had been waiting for—if he had been waiting for anything at all—was late.
Or maybe it had already come and gone.
It didn’t really matter.
He picked up the sandwich, took another absent bite, and let the words of his own existence fade into the sound of passing trains.
life 
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