Ten Toes Down

Recording the awareness of motion through entropy.
That’s my dumb worldview of physics.

It is also the very real experience of my war.

There’s no peace treaty waiting for me at the end of this.
No medals.
Not even the smug satisfaction of being proven right.

I’ve stopped pretending there’s an end state.
I move anyway.

The Lie is everywhere.
You know the drill with me by now.
I’ve made my stance clear.

Now, I’ve seen it die in one place only to rise in another, as if the carcass of it was only a seed.

I know my own Lie.
It is to “watch.”
To “witness the Lie.”
To stand in the debris and record what happens.
And all of that poetic grandstanding bullshit.

I’ve already seen it. I know there’s nothing new left to see.
But it’s the only thing my humanity still knows how to hold.

I’m afraid of being correct.
I’m afraid of it being that simple to see.
I’m afraid of not being at war.

The freedom of my paranoia traps me.
And that is where the Lie festers within me.
In my own battle against something I deem a phantom.
And it manifests itself after defeat.
On a repeating loop.

This is why I scrape at the remnants of my only remaining desires.
This obsession with ridding myself of it is like peeling skin from flesh.
I know what that does to my identity.
How it scars. How it looks.
How it infects and becomes another theater for the same war.

And I do it anyway.

I don’t do this to win.
I do it because war is the only terrain I recognize anymore.
I live here.
I rest here.
I burn out here and keep going, because burnout is just weather.
And climate change approaches.

It isn’t the way. It’s my way.

Some days, I laugh at dumb content.
Algorithmic slop as ambient noise while I play video games.

Other days I enjoy the work, the food, the joke in the middle of the fight.
I don’t see this as contradiction — I see it as proof that the war hasn’t turned me into the thing I fight.
I can still choose.

That’s all I need to keep going.
Right or wrong, I keep choosing.

Freeze me as whatever you want.
Call me whatever you want.
Put me in whatever “enemy” box you have lying around.
The Lie can name me in a hundred tongues and still not touch me.

I regret nothing.
I record, I move, and I leave the record of my battles behind for anyone who wants to see what it looks like when the fight never stops.

This is my world war.
And I will die in motion.

Ten toes down.