I’m Nobody

We enter this world alone. Naked, helpless, crying into a void that will eventually swallow us again. People rush to cradle us, to soothe us, but the body knows — the psyche knows — that the first moment of existence is solitude. Birth is separation, the first proof that no matter how many hands hold us, we are ultimately isolated inside our own skin.

We spend our lives pretending otherwise. Psychology calls it attachment, a mechanism to trick us into believing we are connected. Religion dresses it up as divine purpose, promising we are never alone because some eternal presence watches. Philosophy exposes it more brutally: Sartre calls us abandoned, Nietzsche declares God dead, the Buddhists whisper that everything we cling to is illusion. Different languages, same truth — connection is temporary, and death strips it away.

We leave this world the same way we entered it: alone. In the final moments, no hand can follow us, no voice can accompany us. The neurons burn out, the heart grows still, and consciousness collapses inward into silence. Whether we die in a hospital bed surrounded by family or in the middle of a street, the threshold is crossed alone. The world might mourn, but it cannot walk with us past the final breath.

And then comes the second death: forgetting. Our names might linger on lips for a generation, maybe two, but time devours everything. The grandchild forgets the sound of the grandfather’s laugh. The photograph fades. The gravestone erodes. Eventually, no one speaks our name. Even history’s greatest names are dust beneath the weight of centuries — and what am I, what are you, compared to them? Forgottenness is not just possible; it is inevitable.

Religion tries to soften the blow: eternal life, reincarnation, a cosmic ledger that preserves our souls. But even these promises smell of desperation. Psychology would call them defense mechanisms, the mind’s way of resisting the abyss. Philosophy admits the absurdity of it: Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing the rock despite knowing it will always fall. But how can happiness be found when all roads end in silence and erasure?

I cannot shake the feeling that life is a cruel cycle of being born alone, living in the illusion of connection, and then dying alone only to be erased. Every loss I’ve faced only reinforces this truth. My father, my grandparents, family members buried before their time — each disappearance a reminder that the universe does not care. Death is not punishment. It is indifference. The curse is not supernatural. It is simply existence.

And yet, even knowing this, I still find myself reaching. I still talk to the dead as if they might hear me. I still light candles. I still write, carving words into the void. Maybe it’s weakness. Maybe it’s rebellion. Or maybe it’s the last defense of the human mind: to create meaning in the face of inevitable oblivion.

But I know the truth:
We are born alone.
We live in borrowed illusions.
We die alone.
And we are forgotten.

The silence waits. It always has.