ESSAY: The Final Entrustment

I find, as I move further into age, there are no longer enough tears for the ache I carry through my body and spirit.

I find my patience widening into something nearly oceanic — longer, deeper, more forbearing than it once was — and yet, at the same time, I want only seclusion, because I no longer believe I will ever wholly entrust myself to another human being again.

It is such a foolish little cliché, isn’t it, to become a solitary artist.

And still, there is something grievous in the realization that I cannot truly trust anyone in this world. Even if the possibility were offered to me plainly, I do not believe I would reach for it now.

I continue to believe there is goodness. I continue to believe peace among people is attainable. Somewhere beneath all of this ruin, I still understand that most souls are laboring toward decency, honor, and tenderness.

Perhaps this was some covenant I made in another existence. Or perhaps I am truly as dreadful as I have sometimes been told I am. There have only been three people in my life who treated me with genuine regard.

Once your own mother tells you to take your life, you learn very quickly that love is either a pronunciation or an act — and the pronunciation is weightless. Only the act carries the gravity of truth.

After that, trust becomes a difficult country to inhabit. Still, you must attempt it, because without trust something interior begins to die quietly.

Well, I entrusted myself one final time, and now I can feel that interior death moving through me.

And yet there is still some small living ember inside me that refuses extinction, so I will not surrender it. I will simply remove it from the reach of others.

I tried so hard. I’m in pain.

And what is worse is that there are predatory souls in this world — people who will do anything to retain what they desire, even when the thing they desire does not desire them in return. They will diminish, harry, or dismantle anyone standing in the path of that hunger.

There are people who make sport of the human heart. They interfere with the minds and affections of others because the distortion itself exhilarates them; because it fortifies their private allegiances; because power, to them, is more intoxicating than sincerity ever could be.

Many people mistake this for amusement. It is not amusement not amusing. It is hideousness. Ugly. Low.

It is the antithesis of what we ought to be reaching toward as human beings. It is not love in any capacity.

And I believe that this appetite for domination — this culture and world (no matter the continent) of self-veneration, entitlement, emotional extraction, and spiritual indifference toward one another — is one of the very things undoing humanity itself.

I have reached my limit.

I am gone.

I am working quietly now. I have left social media. I no longer recognize any beauty in it. It has become disfigured. I’ve never known friends.

I am all right to update on my website. I know almost no one sees it, but at least I am sheltered from the grotesque appetites of dishonest people — people who do not truly care for anyone or anything, not even themselves, nor the friendships and loves they so casually profess.

M.

2026