The Bipolar Path

There’s a word in Japanese—Kodoku.
It means loneliness.
But not the kind you feel when no one answers your calls.
It’s deeper.
It’s a space—emotional, spiritual, poetic—between the self and the world.
A space filled with yearning, pain, beauty, and sometimes… truth.

But whose truth?

That question echoes in me. Loud. Repeating.
Because my truth doesn’t always match the world’s.
And that mismatch—that crack—
is where Kodoku lives.

My Mind, My Battlefield

I see things others don’t.
I hear things that feel real to me.
I believe in a world that dances just out of their reach.
And they tell me: that’s not real.
But it feels real.
It hurts real.
It lives in me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m broken,
or if I’m just tuned to a frequency no one else hears.
Like a radio playing a different song—
beautiful, terrifying, and only mine.

People try to reach me, sometimes.
Their words are soft, but their eyes are afraid.
And sometimes they don’t try at all.
And honestly… I don’t know which is worse.

Because Kodoku never fully goes away.
It’s not just being alone.
It’s watching the world pass by through glass you can’t shatter.
It’s holding conversations with voices you trust more than your own reflection.
It’s begging for silence while craving connection.

There are days I feel like two people.
One who walks and smiles and says “I’m fine.”
And one who stands behind a locked door, screaming.
Not for help—just for understanding.

The Violence of Silence

But even when I try to sit with Kodoku,
when I try to make peace with the silence,
sometimes it turns on me.

It becomes a howl.
Not from outside—but from inside my own skull.
It tears through my chest in the middle of a calm conversation.
It drowns me while I’m just standing in line, smiling, pretending.

There’s a violence in this kind of loneliness—
not the kind that breaks bones,
but the kind that breaks your grip on reality.
A slow erosion. A hollowing out.

I try to anchor myself.
To something. Anything.
Music. Breathing. Memory.
But even memory can betray me.
Faces blur. Words twist. Time folds in on itself.

I lose pieces of days.
I lose pieces of myself.

And then I wonder—
was I ever whole to begin with?
Or have I always been fragments dressed as a person?

What’s Real, What’s Left

I talk to myself.
Not in metaphor. Not in poems.
I talk to the voices. Sometimes beg them.
Sometimes curse them.
Sometimes… I listen, because they’re the only ones who talk back.

You think that’s dramatic?
Try living inside a room that never gets quiet.
Try explaining to someone that the shadows move differently for you.
That laughter sometimes sounds like knives.
That the mirror isn’t always trustworthy.

And yet, I still want to be understood.
Not pitied. Not fixed.
Just seen.

Because even in this chaos—
this kaleidoscope of distortion,
this chronic ache I carry like a second spine—
I am still here.

I love. I fear.
I crave the touch of someone who won’t flinch.
I want to laugh without wondering if the laughter is real.
I want to sleep without checking the corners.
I want to be able to say, “I’m not okay,”
without someone looking at me like I’m broken glass.

Because I’m not.

I’m just living in a different language.
One that even I don’t always understand.
But it’s mine.

And in the middle of all this Kodoku—
this cruel, persistent ache—
there is still a flicker.

A flicker of something sacred.
Not hope, not yet.
But maybe the possibility of it.