The Snare of Maya

Affection is a treacherous thing. Once you fall into someone's affection, you're undone—stripped down to the marrow. Affection is like quicksand's snare... step into it once, and the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. The harder you try to pull away, the more you drown.

Everything seemed right, but do you know where the reckoning first goes wrong? The one whose affection has trapped you—perhaps they're trapped in someone else's affection. The one drowning in your affection, another drowns in theirs.

This arithmetic of mismatch, this discrepancy in accounts—is there any solution to it?

I doubt it. We all want only the one in whose affection we're lost; but do we ever ask after those drowning in ours? Do we ever care to know how much, in every moment without us, someone's heart burns to ash? How much, without us, someone's home crumbles to dust?

We discard those who cherish us. We are discarded by those we cherish. Perhaps nature exacts its due. Because I never asked for the one who wanted me, they ask nothing of me either.

In the end, life remains an unfinished tragic novel, a story that never finds its wholeness.

At story's end: just as the one who wants me never has me, so too I never have the one I want.

Like a river that winds and bends, life still flows on, carrying small tales and untales and non-tales, until the river of a human life merges into an ocean of stories. From there, no one ever returns. There, drifting on and on, no one ever settles accounts... how much was gained and how much was lost!