Atlas

After years of constantly moving from one place to another, she wakes up in a new home. It doesn’t faze her, though. She doesn’t care that they were finally settling into a place that didn’t come with the haunted memories of what used to be, or that this was gonna be the last stop after a long time of welcoming places only to say goodbye again when the six months were up. She doesn’t care that her dad finally quit the job that kept shuttling her back and forth to a different home every moment she felt like she could finally just belong somewhere. Because without realizing it, somewhere along these lines, she kind of just lost herself. She lived through different worlds instead of carrying her own. It was just easier that way, to just exist and feel pain vicariously through everything else but herself. And now she’s here, in what her dad claims to be their final move. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.

The thing is, she’s all grown now. It had been years since she last dreamt of finally finding a place that would scream her name and tug her towards its orbit every time she loses her way. And she has, so many times before, maybe even to the point where she numbed herself of life that she forgets to live it. So even when she has the chance to rebuild her ruins, she prefers to stay in the wreckage she is too used to.

She never really knew how to keep her ground anyway. After growing through milestones faster than seasons change, shifting from one home to another, and losing people before she can even have them, permanence just stopped being something she continued to seek. Even when stability finally met its long-overdue homecoming, she was left floating away, still begging for the clock to turn back and be baptized by oblivion.

She was so used to the whole world moving around her that when it finally stopped, she had to keep going—find a new axis for her to rotate on, a new world for her to be devoured by.

Every day, she would open book after book, trying to find something to make her world spin again, finding realms to get sucked into so reality won’t feel real yet. But perhaps all her luck has been poured out on the years before. She no longer has a reason to stay lost in the broken world she once dreaded but now all she wanted. She can no longer lie in the midst of the darkness as the world spins madly on. Now, more than ever, she is forced to carry the weight of the world.

Whether we see it or not, this isn’t a rare occasion for most of us. At one point or another, we ended up attaching ourselves to the forces of the universe that have never been on our side. We spend every day trying to go the distance when deep down, we all just want to go back into our naïve lives. We pretend that we’re ready to face what

the world has for us but when it comes knocking on our doors, we pretend that nobody’s home. We even condition our minds into normalizing our trauma that we forget how we were always meant to grow and become.

And just like that, we find ourselves living an apocalypse, only surviving for the sake of life. We only see the heartbreak of our existence to the point that it’s the only thing we allow to define it. We take the pain and throw it into the deepest reaches just to forget about it. We bask in our nothingness thinking that it’s all we’re going to get.

We spend our lives thinking that the whole universe is painted at the back of our hands, we forget to look up and see what was there all along.

Much like this vast world before us, our lives have a lot more meaning than what we see. Mapping out everything we have yet to become, the revelation unravels that life begins the moment we demand weight into our existence. We begin to find beauty in life the moment we let gravity play god, pull ourselves into focus, and let the weight fall into our fate.

Look at where you are now. Have your shoulders slouched far enough from carrying the world you can never seem to let go of? Back curved from the heavy memories you’ve painted in your gallery? Hands bruised from every slip you never meant to make but are now the stories of your battle scars? Or are you just floating mindlessly? Tired of the weight of having nothing to carry? Letting the pieces of the clock run into years of opportunities while you stay frozen?

There is a world that awaits our discovery, places that await our arrival, and people that await our seams to intertwine. No matter what we find, it is us who will have to carry it.