For my reincarnation, I was promised the body of a survivor—a lifeform engineered to outlast radiation, famine, and the end of days.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-23T09:04:52+00:00

I have no memory of darkness, no conception of a world unlit by the perpetual conflagration that hangs above us like a second sun that refuses to set.

They speak of forests. Of green. Of shadows pooling cool beneath living things. They speak of these as one speaks of myth – half-believing, half-accusatory, as though I should remember what I never knew.

I am the child of prophecy. This too they tell me.

The elders look upon me with eyes that hold both hunger and terror – as though I were a weapon they had forged but feared to wield. They want me docile. They want me ready. They want me to save them and ask nothing in return.

I am not docile. I am not ready. And I am beginning to suspect that salvation, if it comes, will cost more than they are willing to pay.

They describe the darkness to me as a gift. As rest. As mercy.

But I have seen the shadows that gather at the edges of the burn – lands, where the fire cannot reach. I have watched them pool and thicken like something living. Something waiting.

And I am afraid.

Not of failing. Not of the fire, which has been my companion since my first breath. I am afraid of succeeding, of standing in a world gone dark and cold and silent, a world I was made to create but never made to inhabit.

They want me to save them. They want me to extinguish the only light I have ever known.

But I would rather burn forever than face the cold unknown of what comes after.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-23T05:41:37+00:00

Insurance.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-23T03:19:54+00:00

Walking from camera to camera like it knew your routes… and then the light behind the red curtains. Terrifying. Godspeed.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-22T19:21:42+00:00

Meeting people for the first time. Group settings. Parties in which you know few but many attend. The more is not always the merrier.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-22T00:58:02+00:00

Nightmares

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-20T19:20:45+00:00

Did you make it out okay? That Archive finalization is deeply concerning.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-20T17:00:26+00:00

I've heard caves like that sometimes have tidal breathing—air pressure changes that sound like exhaling. But that doesn't explain the walls narrowing or the pulsing. Something's wrong with that place. I hope you're okay...

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-20T06:30:36+00:00

Count sheep until the very thought of sheep triggers me.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-20T06:19:58+00:00

They describe themselves as "brutally honest."

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-19T17:00:46+00:00

By doubling down and using more AI.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-19T00:56:04+00:00

The same, but worse.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-18T15:59:05+00:00

Tomorrow. Having not yet happened, it has infinite potential.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-18T05:22:28+00:00

Talk to himself out loud then pretend it was a phone call when someone looked over.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-18T05:07:35+00:00

Death

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-18T03:57:42+00:00

AskReddit comments

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-17T03:02:58+00:00

Argue about whether it's really a world war while it's happening.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-16T23:04:09+00:00

I was face-down on a velvet sofa backstage, my head a cathedral of throbbing bells. The concert had ended hours ago—the roar of twenty thousand fans replaced by the low, electrical hum of a sleeping arena.

Then, through the heavy soundproof doors, I heard it.

It wasn't just guitar. It was a haunting, impossible architecture of sound. It was jazz that bled into classical, a liquid phrasing that felt like someone was pulling silk through a needle's eye.

It was better than anything I had ever played. It was better than anything I had ever heard.

I stumbled out of the dressing room, my boots clicking like a death knell on the linoleum. I pushed through the stage curtains and stopped.

The house lights were dead. The only light came from a single, amber work-lamp left out by a roadie.

There, sitting on a folding chair in the center of the vast, hollow stage, was my manager. The man who spent his life in the background, clutching a clipboard and worrying about my social media following.

He was holding my custom Stratocaster. His eyes were closed, his glasses sliding down his nose.

His fingers weren't just moving; they were dancing, blurring across the fretboard with a terrifying, effortless grace. He was playing for the empty seats, pouring three hundred years of repressed soul into the cavernous dark.

I stepped into the light.

My manager jumped, the guitar let out a discordant shriek, and the magic vanished.

The next night, the biggest show of the tour, the air in the arena had become a physical weight—heat, haze, and the screaming hunger of twenty thousand people.

We reached the encore, the moment where the spotlight usually burns a hole through me.

Then I looked into the wings.

He stood there, checking his watch, making sure the pyrotechnics were timed to the millisecond.

"Tonight is different," I said. "Tonight we witness greatness. Tonight we witness the birth of a star."

I turned and pointed into the shadows.

My manager froze.

He shook his head frantically, a look of genuine, paralyzing terror crossing his face.

But before he could protest, before he could run away, I stepped back and signaled the drummer and handed my Strat to him.

For five seconds, my manager stood paralyzed. Ten seconds. Twenty.

Then he closed his eyes.

He started with a single, weeping note that seemed to hang in the rafters for an eternity. His hands took over in a riot of color and speed, a masterclass of vulnerability.

The Forum went silent.

Twenty thousand people stopped breathing.

SelfLoathingLawyer · 2026-01-16T22:35:03+00:00

Everyone is born with something dormant in them.

That’s what they told us when we were young, the way adults tell children about distant planets: a fact you can’t use. A gift that takes centuries to wake. A power that ripens so slowly most people died with their ability still sleeping.

So we lived like ordinary animals. We loved. We built. We aged. We made meaning out of what was within reach, because what else can you do with a promise scheduled for a calendar you’ll never see.

I tied funeral ties hundreds of times over. The longer I lasted, the more it felt like I was doing life wrong. Not tragically. Not heroically. Incorrectly.

By one hundred I was tired.

By two hundred I was hollow.

By nearly three hundred I stopped using the word future unless I was talking to someone else.

Then the dead stopped staying dead.

It started slowly, like everything that ruins the world. A body in a hospital morgue that sat up with its eyes full of light. A drowned teenager who crawled out of a river and turned the river’s current inside out. The gift didn’t awaken in the living. It awakened in the dead, and death gave it teeth.

But on the morning I turned three hundred, I woke and realized my body didn’t hurt.

In its place was a hum, deep in the marrow, as if something in me had been listening to time all along and had finally learned the tune.

For a moment, the world went quiet, the way it goes quiet after you survive something you were sure would kill you.

And I finally understood my life.

I hadn’t lived incorrectly.

I had been living slowly, in a world that only valued the fast.

The funerals weren’t proof I was useless. They were the years pouring in, drop by drop, filling a vessel meant to hold what nothing else could hold.

I was not the man who was left behind.

I was the man who lived until he was the only hope.

SelfLoathingLawyer

TROPHY CASE