There is a fundamental ugliness to existence, not because life is cruel in bursts, but because it is monotonously vulgar. The flesh swells and sags. The days accumulate like dust, never sharp, never final, only continuous. We are eroded by repetition.
Consciousness is the original affliction. To be human is not to live, but to be aware of life, and therefore never fully inside it. We observe ourselves like prisoners looking at their limbs through the bars. We are given hunger, and then taught shame for needing. We are given desire and then asked to make it moral. Everything is crooked, even our virtues.
Intellect is far from a gift, it is a kind of slow disfigurement. It grants only refined forms of despair. We analyze our suffering until it becomes a form of architecture. We name it, categorize it, ornament it, yet it remains. A person can write a thousand pages and still wake with dread, still flinching at their reflection.
Love fails. God hides. History forgets. The body declines. And yet we continue, out of fear, out of vanity, out of dull inertia misnamed hope.
But if there is any dignity to be found, and I do not say hope, I say dignity, it is not in enduring this farce. It is in confronting it with a clarity so exact, so merciless, that it becomes form. That is the task of shaping one’s end. Not to flee into distraction, nor to drown in abstraction, but to master the choreography of one’s disappearance.
A death without form is an insult. A life prolonged merely out of habit is a kind of cowardice.
There is a silence more beautiful than survival.
One must not wait to be destroyed, to decay. One must choose the hour. One must decide the posture. Let the final act bear the symmetry the world denied. Let the blood write what the language of the living could not. Not because death is an escape, it is not, but because it can, for a moment, become an assertion of will in a universe that allows for none.
It is not the longing for death that dignifies a man. It is the refusal to let death arrive unshaped.
Author’s Note:
This piece was inspired by Yukio Mishima’s fierce insistence on finding tragic beauty and deliberate form in the face of inevitable decay and meaninglessness. It also draws from Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism and Camus’ confrontation with absurdity. To me, it is an exploration of how one might meet the unbearable human condition, not with false hope, but with a conscious, uncompromising act of will. It is a meditation on the dignity found in choosing how to face the end, rather than succumbing to aimless endurance.
Kendra Uzochukwu | 14 | Los Angeles, CA | @kendraav229 on Instagram
