life

Tag: dailyprompt-1905

  • The Truth Is Always a Few Steps Further

    a coin in the dirt—
    half-buried, never quite lost,
    glinting when you move

    In the summer of 2006, I lived for a while in a bland apartment near the harbor.
    It wasn’t scenic.
    There were no postcards of that part of town.
    Cargo crates stacked like children’s blocks, gulls arguing in circles, and the thick, stubborn smell of diesel and old water.
    The building itself had peeling green paint, and the elevator made a sound like it was considering not working that day.
    But the rent was cheap, and from the tiny balcony, you could see the cranes move at sunrise like mechanical insects waking from dreams.

    I was doing freelance translation work back then—manuals, mostly.
    Microwaves. Fax machines. One memorable project on the proper maintenance of industrial ice makers.
    I could finish my work by noon and then wander the rest of the day,
    which is exactly what I did.

    I got into the habit of walking along the edge of the dockyards.
    There was a vending machine there that only accepted coins and only sold barley tea, no matter how many buttons it had.
    I liked that.
    Something about its refusal to change.

    One afternoon, I noticed a rusted sign outside a closed-down hardware store.
    It said, “If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.”
    The letters were faded, like the sign was embarrassed by its own insistence.
    But it stuck with me.
    It felt like a message left for anyone who needed it.
    And I needed it more than I thought.

    When I was a kid, I used to think adults knew things.
    Big things.
    Definite, unshakeable truths.
    But then I got older and realized most people just pick a version of the truth that makes them comfortable,
    then stop looking.

    There was a girl I met during that time—
    she worked at a laundromat three blocks away.
    Always reading thick novels behind the counter, always barefoot.
    She told me once,
    “People only ask questions they already have answers to. It’s the questions with no answers that scare them.”

    I didn’t understand it fully at the time.
    But she said it so plainly, I wrote it down in the margin of a notebook meant for invoices.

    The thing is—
    the surface explanation is always easier.
    It’s comforting to accept the first answer that sounds right.
    But real understanding—the kind that changes you—lives deeper down.
    And to reach it, you have to keep moving.
    You have to stay curious, even when the answers stop being simple.
    Even when you wish they were.

    I’ve learned that the world is full of half-truths dressed up as facts.
    We build entire lives around them—
    about what love is supposed to feel like,
    what success should look like,
    what kind of person we’re meant to be.
    But sometimes the explanation doesn’t fit.
    It rubs at the edges.
    It leaves too much unsaid.

    And in those moments,
    you can choose to settle.
    Or you can choose to go further.

    The truth doesn’t always arrive dressed in clarity.
    Sometimes it’s a feeling you get when a stranger says something that shouldn’t matter but does.
    Sometimes it’s a contradiction that refuses to untangle.
    Sometimes it’s just a question that won’t go quiet.

    But if you follow it—
    if you keep asking,
    keep walking,
    keep noticing what doesn’t sit right—
    the world unfolds in strange and beautiful ways.

    Now, years later, I don’t work with microwaves anymore.
    I live in a different city, where the cranes don’t move at sunrise and the vending machines take credit cards.
    But I still don’t trust simple answers.
    I still write questions in the margins.
    And I still remember that rusted sign by the dock.

    If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.

    It probably means you’re close.

  • Everything I Know Might Be Wrong

    spring fog drifts slowly—
    what was a mountain yesterday,
    today is just mist

    In the spring of 2002, I was renting a small second-floor apartment above an internet café that stayed open 24 hours.
    You could hear the soft hum of computers and the occasional thud of someone losing at Counter-Strike.
    Downstairs smelled like instant ramen, sweat, and pixelated ambition.
    My place was nothing special—a futon on the floor, a chipped desk I found on the street, a cheap lamp that flickered when the fridge turned on.
    But it was mine, and back then, that seemed like enough.

    At the time, I believed I understood life.
    I had routines: instant coffee in the morning, scrambled eggs if I remembered to buy them, radio turned low while I checked my email on a chunky silver laptop that wheezed like an old man.
    I worked part-time at a CD rental shop—back when people still rented music.
    You could browse for hours, picking albums based on cover art alone.
    I liked that.
    There was something democratic about it.
    Everyone was just guessing.

    One day, I stepped onto the balcony with damp laundry clinging to my arms, and I froze.
    It wasn’t dramatic.
    No thunderclap.
    Just this flat, persistent realization sliding into my head like a pop-up ad I couldn’t close:
    I don’t actually know anything.

    In high school, I once had a philosophy teacher who wore the same beige windbreaker every day.
    He told us on the first day of class that the only useful thing he could teach us was to doubt what we think we know.
    Most of us ignored him—too busy memorizing Nietzsche quotes to sound profound at parties.
    But one day, he drew a triangle on the blackboard and said, “You can call this a triangle. That’s a label. But what if, in your next life, this exact shape means something else—like hunger or love or god?”
    We laughed at him.
    But I’ve never forgotten it.

    And that morning on the balcony, two decades later, the triangle came back.
    Everything we think we know rests on labels.
    And labels shift.
    They evolve.
    Sometimes overnight.

    I had called myself independent.
    But maybe I was just afraid of needing anyone.
    I called my quiet “peace,”
    but maybe it was just loneliness I’d dressed in better words.
    I thought I was disciplined,
    but I was just afraid of what would happen if I stopped moving.

    At night, I’d take long walks with no destination.
    Just the sound of vending machines whirring beside me,
    the flicker of CRT monitors in dark windows,
    and the distant bass of a club that only played R&B from five years ago.
    Everything felt like it was in-between—
    like the city itself hadn’t decided what it was yet.
    And I liked it that way.

    Once, I passed a girl sitting alone at a bus stop at 1 a.m.,
    holding a Walkman and nodding along to a song no one else could hear.
    She looked up, saw me watching her, and smiled.
    Not the kind of smile that invites conversation.
    The kind that says, I know you don’t know me, but we’re both real right now.

    Years have passed.
    The CD shop is gone.
    The internet café is now a vape store.
    That silver laptop gave up sometime during the Obama administration.

    But every so often—folding laundry, burning rice, staring at the wall while the kettle hums—I remember how little I know.
    And how freeing that actually is.

    Because once you stop pretending everything means something fixed,
    you get to ask better questions.
    Not what is this supposed to be?
    but what is this, right now?

    And that’s enough.
    Maybe more than enough.