A Reminder about Life

The passage below are transcribed from @Mc.Baldiee, an anonymous writer and creator on TikTok and Instagram, in order to offer a reminder about the fleeting but sacred nature of life. If you would like to support their uplifting, poetic endeavors, be sure to visit their shop.

Consider this: you are holding a book that does not allow regret. Its pages are woven from vapor, with margins stitched with the thinnest thread you can imagine. The moment your eyes more forward, the parchment behind you does not sit obediently waiting. It crumbles, softly, like snow melting in a warm palm.

There is no turning back because the past simply cannot survive your gaze once it has passed through it. So, I ask you: how would you read such a book? Would you devour each line with a hurried hunger, or would you cradle each sentence as if the ink itself were breathing?

Would you race, certain you can return, or would you let the words seep into you like rain through old stone?

This is the quiet truth we may sometimes forget. Life is the story you can only read once. Every moment you skim is a chapter you lose forever. You treat your days like cheap pages, believing you can always revisit. But time is a jealous author, and it never grants second drafts.

Yet do not shiver as there is comfort here, too. For what vanishes behind you becomes part of you, like the way a fire disappears into warmth. Or the way a song dissolves but leaves its echo lodged in the body.

Look now at the page before you. It glows fainty with a friendly invitation. This line, this breath and heartbeat, is the only sentence in the universe that still exists. Read it slowly and deeply. Let the ink sink into the unseen chambers of your being. And when the last page arrives, as it does for all travelers, you will not beg for a way back. You will close the book with gentle hands, knowing you read your life not perfectly but presently.

That is the truest artistry any mortal ever achieves.

The second passage offers a reminder about the importance of forgiveness, though not for the tormentor but to yourself.

Anger is a fever dream. It flares in the marrow, red and ravenous. Then, like all storms, it passes, leaving only the echo of thunder in your chest. It is the cry of the wounded animal and the fire of the frightened child who still believes they are worth saving.

So, I do not fear your anger. It is wild, yes, but it still alive. It wants something better. It remembers how joy tasted before it was stolen. It throws stones because it still believes something sacred can be rebuilt.

But hatred is a glacier with no sun above it. It is silence that pretends to be peace. It is what anger becomes when it gives up the dream of ever being understood. Hatred is not the scream but the whisper that comes after when no one is left to listen. It tells you to harden, calcify, and cauterize every soft thing inside, wearing your wounds like armor.

Hatred is a brilliant liar. It makes the pain feel useful, saying, “this is your fuel now, burn on it.” And so, you do, not realizing you are setting fire to the home inside your own mind.

I have seen what is left when the smoke clears; eyes that no longer cry, tongues that only speak in blame, hands that once reached for the stars, but now clench into fists without knowing why. And the most tragic thing? They forget the first heartbreak, the laughter before the war, why they ever cared at all. Only the cold remains, like the memory of music in a room that no longer holds sound.

So, I offer you this: be angry, blistering, loud, and real, letting it bloom like blood in the water but do not drink it. Let time kneel beside you like a patient friend, letting the ache unravel itself without needing a target. Let yourself grieve without needing to grow teeth because hatred will ask you to become the thing that hurts you, convincing you that it was your idea all along.

You are not a monument to your betrayal, not a temple for your tormentors. You are the field that grows back after the fire and the light that returns to the window no one thought could hold warmth again.

I know it is hard. I know how heavy forgiveness feels when it is not for them but for you. How terrifying peace is when war is all you have known. But come back to yourself, even if you must crawl and scream. You are allowed to be angry and rage, but do not rot. Please, do not let the rot remember your name.