Life, it turns out, is something to be carved. Time and reality — two gleaming, razor-sharp blades —

cut away life’s excess, piece by piece, until all that remains are the memories etched into bone.

Yet even those memories are like torn fragments, impossible to reassemble. Life, in its essence, is cruel.

It pierces us full of holes, leaving us nowhere to hide. Young hearts grow old before their time,

faces weathered with the wear of the world. It herds us into a dead end, and as we scramble desperately for a way out,

we finally put on a mask that doesn’t truly belong to us, to protect ourselves.

Only then do we stand a chance of survival.

I once longed for a simple, carefree life — to be someone blissfully unaware.

But reality won’t allow it.

Every day we trudge through a city of steel and concrete under the blazing sun,

exposed and raw beneath the merciless sky. For the sake of survival,

we’ve all learned to disguise our true faces,

confronting the people and events around us with a false mask.

People become hypocritical,

calculating, pragmatic, selfish — as if without these traits, we couldn’t survive at all.

It’s a terrifying mask — the moment you put it on, you lose yourself.

And yet so many people put it on as though addicted.

I’ve come to dread looking into the eyes of those around me — bottomless and unfathomable,

each gaze capable of killing you on a spiritual level,

no weapon required.

I realize that I, too, have become selfish, donning that mask without even noticing.

Lately, consumed by work and personal passions,

I’ve neglected my friends, rarely reaching out.

Even when I see them online, I don’t know what words to use for a simple greeting.

A sense of estrangement seems to have crept in between us.

This is life — experiencing it, feeling lost in it, giving it our all…

And then understanding what kind of life we truly need. That is how we grow.

The fatigue, the pain, the hardship, the laughter, the joy — they are all just brief interludes in life’s symphony.

And it is precisely these varied interludes

that compose life’s magnum opus. No matter how bitter life gets, no matter how much we complain,

we must still be grateful to the heavens: for letting us taste life’s full spectrum — sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy —

for letting us harvest something different from each flavor,

for tempering us to face, ever more resolutely, everything that life bestows.