Yet Again: An Update

17th March 2026. 6:55PM

The cockroach scurried across my notebook just as I was about to write "God is dead," which, given the circumstances, felt like the universe's idea of a punchline. I watched its antennae twitch as it paused over Nietzsche's corpse, and wondered if insects ever lose faith in their own survival. Meanwhile, my phone buzzed with another news alert: another politician caught with his pants down (literally), another wildfire, another war. The cockroach, at least, had the decency to look embarrassed for all of us.

I tried to remember the last time I felt something besides this dull, gnawing static, like chewing on aluminum foil while the world burned. Was it before the layoff? Before the third failed antidepressant? Before I realized the cat’s purring sounded eerily like the hum of a dying refrigerator? The neighbor’s kid screamed bloody murder outside, probably over a skinned knee or a stolen toy, and for a second I envied him. At least his suffering still had edges you could see. Then, I remember how I used to scream like that as a kid but it was barely over a skinned knee or a stolen toy, …more like it was always something bone-deep, airless, siren-loud... the kind of fear that sat on your chest and counted your breaths for you, the kind that made the walls feel closer than they were. Back then, the screaming at least had a direction. It pointed somewhere. Now it just echoes.

The cockroach had vanished, leaving behind a single, gleaming leg stuck to the page like a macabre bookmark. I flicked it off and wondered if this was how deities felt when we stopped believing in them... slightly irritated, mostly just tired, dissolving into the wallpaper of a universe that never really needed them anyway. My tea had gone cold. As always. I drank it anyway. As always. The extra-milkiness in the cold tea infused sugar water pooling under my tongue like a bad confession.

Downstairs, someone was screaming badly. As always. The notes slithered through the floorboards, each one a tiny crushing of hope. I thought about texting my old friend, just to see if she'd remember me, but my fingers hesitated over the screen. One of our last conversations still glowed in my head, where she told me: You don't get to be this sad forever. Funny how the people who leave always sound like bad fortune cookies. Well, in this case, it was me who left. I abandon, abandon, and abandon. Just like how the world leaders are killing, killing, and killing.

I keep thinking maybe the problem isn’t that the world is ending, but that it refuses to end cleanly. It just drags itself forward, shedding skins, wars into ceasefires into wars again, scandals into apologies into book deals, like that cockroach, leaving pieces of itself behind as proof it was here, but never enough to kill it. Maybe that’s what survival really looks like: not triumph, not resilience, just this stubborn, undignified continuation. I draw parallels between my own trauma and survival and recovery with the world's. I imagine, did the world's trauma end for it to start its recovery ever? Or, before it could recover, humans started inflicting trauma again? And, what's gonna happen when it all comes to an end? When the healing starts, because it is not straight. It is messy and

I stare at my phone again. Her name still sits there, unchanged, like a gravestone that occasionally lights up. I wonder what I’d even say. Hi, I’m still here. Unfortunately. Or maybe: You were right. I didn’t get to be this sad forever. It just changed shape, learned new tricks, found quieter places to hide.

The screaming downstairs stops abruptly. Silence rushes in, thick and almost wet, like it has weight. For a moment, I think something terrible has happened. Then a door slams, footsteps, a television flickers to life with laughter, canned and hollow. Of course. Nothing terrible. Just the usual.

I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, like I’m afraid the air might run out if I’m not careful. The room smells faintly of dust and overboiled milk. The notebook page is still open, the sentence unfinished, the place where the cockroach stood now just a faint smudge.

“God is—”

I stop. Not because I disagree, or because I suddenly believe, but because the sentence feels too neat, too final for something that refuses to resolve. Maybe that’s the real joke. Not that God is dead, but that nothing ever quite dies enough to be done with.

I close the notebook.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably open it again.

~ Oizys.