better running than rotting

the unbearable weight of a life that never shifts. yikes.

There’s something unsettling about the way silence lingers when the world is too still. Not peaceful. Not soft. Just, stale.

I don’t fear death. It’s strange to admit. But I don’t. Maybe because I’ve made peace with the idea that everything ends. Maybe because I’ve seen how things- people, cities, memories leave, and yet, somehow, the world goes on turning.

But I do fear the things that stay.

Like routines that calcify. Like a job that stretches on endlessly, offering no growth, just familiarity. Like rooms that never change their smell, their light, their weight. Like the parts of myself I keep encountering over and over again. No matter how far I think I’ve run.

There is a kind of death that doesn’t come with a funeral. It creeps in through sameness. Through waking up in a life that doesn’t feel like it fits anymore. Through days so quiet they scream.

And that’s the death I’m scared of. Not the kind that ends me- but the kind that keeps me exactly where I am.

Still.

Paralyzed not by fear of failure, but by fear of choosing. Fear that the life I carve for myself will be wrong, or worse—mediocre. That it won’t matter. That it won’t be worth the pain of reshaping.

But even that pain feels better than the numbness of standing still.

What is stillness if not a slow decay? Not the meditative stillness that centers you—no, not that. But the heavy kind. The kind that sits on your chest. The kind where a year passes and nothing about you feels different,
except that you’ve grown tired of waiting for a moment that never came.

There’s this myth we build our lives around - that one day, clarity will arrive like lightning. That the doors will open. That something or someone will lift us from our stillness. But clarity doesn’t crash through the window. It’s forged in motion. In choosing. In trying something and failing and trying again. It’s made in burnt dinners, bad poetry, messy conversations, late-night Google searches about cities you might never move to.

And still, I find myself hesitating. Because movement, while life-affirming, is terrifying. Stillness is safe. Stillness is polite. Stillness doesn’t risk being wrong. But it also doesn’t risk being free.

There are days I imagine just walking away. No note. No final post. Just a slow erasure. To become someone who disappears, not out of defeat, but out of a need to return to motion. To feel something new. To be someone else for a while, or maybe for good.

And sometimes, I wonder if all of this—the need to keep moving, the restlessness, is just another form of running. But even if it is, at least running is a direction. At least running requires breath. And breath is more than I can say for stillness.

So no, I don’t fear death. But I do fear waking up in ten years in the same room, with the same words, telling the same story to myself about why I couldn’t move.