Ang magnais ay kahalintulad ng tumayong malapit sa gilid ng riles habang papalapit ang tren. Parang ako’y hinihigop, maaaring dalhin ako ng hangin nito at masagasaan.

Kung kaya, natuto ako kung paano mag-paalam bago pa man dumating at bumati. Kinakabisado ko ang lahat ng labasan bago pa man ako pumasok sa pintuan.

Ito ang digmaang ginagawa ko sa mga tahimik na oras— sa pagitan ng aking kamay na nagnanais na ikaw ay maabot at ng kamay kong umuurong pabalik sa aking likod na nagnanais lumisan.

Dito ako gumawa ng aking tahanan, sa lugar ng “halos” at “muntik na”. Sa ilaw ng kalahating liwanag at kalahating dilim. Dito, walang sinuman ang maaaring mang-iwan, sapagkat ang pinto ay sarado para sa kung sino man ang darating.

Ngunit ikaw ay dumating at winasak ang pinto. Nag-a-anyaya at nagsasabing, “Halika, dito tayo sa labas, sa ilalim ng liwanag ng araw, kung saan nabubuhay ang lahat.”

At ako naman ay tila isang batang nakaupo sa isang sulok ng bahay, at nagsasabing, “Naaalala ko kung paano hampasin ng bagyo at maiwan sa lamig ng dilim.”

Ngunit kung minsan, iniisip ko, paano kaya ang mabuhay ng buong ningning at ganap na naiilawan ng sikat ng araw? Ano ang pakiramdam ng mayakap mo?

Paano matutunan na ang kailanganin ka ay hindi katumbas ng pagkalunod? Paano matutong lumangoy? Paano sumubok na maniwala na hindi lahat ng pinto ay patungo sa bangin, na ang ilan ay tungo sa isang kanlungan?

At ngayon ang munting bata ay nanginginig sa takot, tila naghihintay sa araw ng pagbitay. Nagsusumamo: yakapin mo ako ng mahigpit, akayin mo ako sa liwanag ng araw, huwag mong bibitawan ang aking kamay, hanggang sa maniwala ako… na dito sa piling mo, sa ilalim ng liwanag, ang tunay kong tahanan.

I just met him,
yet I’ve always known him.

He was my death
and my resurrection.

My forever.

When they ask, “Who was your first boyfriend?” I can barely piece together an answer. There’s a hazy outline—a boy who was supposed to be devastatingly handsome, stolen away by my cousin. But I can’t see his face. Can’t recall his name. Can’t remember anything about us. He must have meant nothing to me, I always reasoned. After all, how could I forget someone who truly mattered?

When they ask, “Who was your first love?” I’ve always answered: Fred. The man I met in Monumento, Caloocan in 1999. That’s where my story began—or so I believed.

But I had no idea how much I’d buried. How many memories lay hidden beneath the surface, locked away for three decades. Waiting.

But he came back. Three decades have passed, and the memories rose like ghosts from shallow graves… fragmented, hazy, but insistent.

A boy. He was 16. I was 14.

It started ordinarily enough. At school, a neighbor… my schoolmate… delivered the news: his cousin had a crush on me, wanted to court me. I shrugged, unable to imagine it mattered.

Then he appeared.

I was walking home from school when I saw him—this dashing boy of 16, dressed like he’d stepped out of a music video in his urban hip-hop outfit. He introduced himself. JB. The new kid in town. The cousin. I’d glimpsed him in our neighborhood days before, thought him impossibly handsome, so far above my league that the possibility of his interest had never even flickered through my mind.

He wasn’t in school—already working at 16. But every day, he’d borrow his cousin’s uniform just to slip onto our campus and share lunch with me. Every afternoon, he’d be waiting to walk me home. One day at our favorite meeting spot, he asked if I would be his girlfriend. I couldn’t answer. Instead, like the child I still was—an ’80s/’90s kid in hand-me-down clothes from typhoon donations and those classic “puruntong” shorts—I climbed trees and jumped around, playing. He asked again. “Silence means yes,” I finally said, then went back to being a little kid, carrying my massive insecurities like stones in my pockets. How could someone who looked like a matinee idol want someone like me?

But somehow, he did.

We were effortless together. Our personalities fit like puzzle pieces, and the memories we made were golden and uncomplicated. He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my forgotten first love. I was his first girlfriend, first love and first kiss as well. It was the best and purest time of my life—when love asked nothing of me except that I exist.

Then came my uncle’s wake.

All the kids and teenagers had gathered that night when my cousin arrived—older than us, beautiful, with a reputation for claiming any boy she wanted. She sat down beside JB and began to flirt. He just sat there. And I watched. She was everything I wasn’t: fully formed where I was barely becoming, stylish where I was threadbare. Next to her, JB looked like he’d found his match.

My 14-year-old heart shattered in that moment.

I decided for both of us. Certain I would lose him to her, I ran. I stopped speaking to him entirely, severed everything we’d been. For nine years, he tried to reach me, tried to talk. When I came home to the province at 19, his cousin found me with a message: JB wanted to see me. By then, I’d become what I’d dreamed of—a fully formed young woman, dressed well, pretty. But standing there, I thought: “What’s the point? I waited to become this person for him, but I’m with someone else now.”

So I didn’t see him. I let the door close on whatever we might have said to each other.

But the wound never healed. I just learned to bury it deeper.

I consciously did everything I could to forget him. Every time his memory surfaced and the heartbreak came rushing back, I distracted myself until the pain dulled, then disappeared. Eventually, his face faded into nothing. All I remembered was that I’d had a first boyfriend whose features I couldn’t recall, and that my cousin had stolen him. I didn’t even remember he was my first love—I convinced myself it was someone else.

At 17, I found myself homeless on the streets of Manila, taking shelter under bridges and train stations. I became a stripper. I navigated an underground world that most people only encounter in movies or novels—drug lords, gambling lords, illegal cartels. I went to jail for working underage. I was kidnapped. At some point auctioned like a commodity. I became a drug addict. And through it all, I fell into the same pattern in countless toxic relationships: I only ever dated deadbeats, losers, extractive men below my league who used me. They felt less dangerous than JB had been. I didn’t know this consciously, but some part of me understood—if I only chose men who had nothing to offer, they’d stay, they’d choose me, I’d never have to feel that kind of heartbreak again.

With only a high school diploma, I clawed my way back. I taught myself computer engineering. I got hired as a senior developer for a Fortune 100 company—one of the biggest airlines in the world, based in Chicago. My career thrived. I was promoted to systems architect, won awards for my work, became an Engineering Manager leading a cross-functional team of highly educated engineers and architects, with degrees I never had.

But my love life remained a disaster—still dating deadbeats, still repeating the pattern.

Finally, I stopped. I decided to be alone for the rest of my life. I read everything, watched countless videos about love and relationships. All the advice was the same: mind games. “Don’t be too available.” Act this way, not that way. If I couldn’t be my authentic self, I’d rather be with no one.

Then I met T.

He was the complete opposite of anyone I’d dated since JB. Six-foot-seven, very fit, looked like a Calvin Klein supermodel. A Linux engineer and AWS architect. A surfer, a kickboxer. He played guitar and sang beautifully. He was genuinely kind, truly benevolent. He owned a house, an SUV, a Harley motorcycle—all paid off. Big savings account, money in the stock market, a storage business. He had every quality any woman could want. And he wanted me. He wanted to live together, to settle down.

My siblings begged me to settle down with him. I explained that I was happy living alone and didn’t want to trade my peace for anything. Despite all of T’s qualities, I didn’t feel the connection. I didn’t feel understood.

I told them I didn’t think anyone would ever understand me—my life arc was too unique. The odds of finding someone who truly understood were like winning the Powerball.

The only way I’d ever get married was if a man surpassed T, was benevolent, loved my family, and understood who I was and what I’d been through. Someone who knew what it was like to have nothing, to be a vagabond, and rise up. Someone who knew patience, endurance, perseverance. Someone who knew what it meant to sacrifice for the people they loved, to be so incredibly lonely it felt suffocating. Someone who knew what it was like to live exiled from home, to get beaten up by life so thoroughly and still come out whole—kinder, more compassionate. Someone whose life arc mirrored mine.

It was an impossible standard.

“I will never be in a relationship again,” I said. “I will never get married, because it’s impossible to find the man I’m looking for.”

Then something strange began.

A single line from a song wormed its way into my consciousness: “If I found the place, would I recognize the face?” Over and over. Day after day. For months, it played on an endless loop in my mind, insistent and unexplained.

One afternoon, while helping a friend organize her home, I caught myself singing it aloud throughout the day. Finally, I apologized. “Sorry—I don’t know why, but that line has been stuck in my head for months.”

I had no idea it was trying to tell me something.

Then one day, without warning, a memory surfaced—something crucial, something vital—only to slip away before I could grasp it. And my mouth spoke on its own.

“Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

The words tore out of me like a desperate cry for help. I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know why I was saying them. But my brain was in full panic, seized by an urgency I couldn’t understand. Something deep inside me was screaming: “You have to remember! You must not forget! If nothing else—just remember Sabira!”

I called my siblings immediately. I had to tell someone.

“Something strange just happened,” I said. “It was like something possessed me for a moment.”

I didn’t know then that it wasn’t possession.

It was my past, fighting to be remembered.

Two weeks later, JB found me on Facebook. After searching for me for three decades. I found out on the day, he restarted his search for me — was the same day my mouth spoke “Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

He messaged me, asked if I remembered him. But I didn’t. I clicked on his profile, scrolled through his photos, and my heart skipped a beat. “Who is this? Handsome—devastatingly so. Be careful. Don’t get carried away. Ask who he is first. He might be a relative.” I didn’t even know it was him, and I was already falling again. I sent his pictures to my siblings: “His name is JB. I don’t remember him. Do any of you know him?”

Then a fragment of memory returned, a flashback: him kissing me in an alley on the way home from school.

Now I’m 44. He’s 46. Still professing his undying love for me, telling me I’m his first love, that he never forgot me. He wants to see me. And when he told me about the life he’d lived these past three decades, it was like looking in a mirror. He’d also become a vagabond, endured hardships, lived exiled from home. His life arc was nearly identical to mine.

He was the impossible standard. And the universe delivered.

And just like the line in the song that was stuck in my head, I did not recognized him at first.

And for 13 years, he’d been living in Saudi Arabia—exiled, just as I had been living in the US for the last 15 years.

I opened Google, and typed: Sabira

The definition appeared on my screen:

The name Sabira is primarily of Arabic origin, meaning “patient,” “enduring,” or “persevering,” derived from the root word sabr (patience). It signifies resilience and strength in facing adversity, often found in Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures, and can also have Sanskrit connections meaning “beautiful”.

My breath caught.

Patient. Enduring. Persevering. Resilient in the face of adversity.

Every word was JB. The essence of who he was, distilled into a single name I’d buried for thirty years.

And he lived in Saudi Arabia.

The coincidence was impossible. The connection, undeniable.

My subconscious had been trying to tell me all along.

It was as though no time had passed at all. We snapped right back to the way we were. There was no ambiguity, no games. He came full force: “I love you. I always have, always will. I want to marry you. I want us to grow old together. I want to take care of you. I love you across all time—not just one specific version of you when we were teenagers. I love YOU, the fundamental YOU, the irreducible YOU. Whatever the past 30 years has done to you—those aren’t you, those are add-ons. YOU are who I love.”

No games. No push and pull. He works 12.5 hours per day, and in every pocket of free time, he makes time for me. He’s never too busy to check on me. With him, I don’t need to be anything else. He chose me long before I became what everyone sees me as now—puruntong shorts and all.

I still don’t remember everything. But every time he tells me a memory, my own version surfaces—piece by piece, our shared history coming back to life.

We’ve been talking. We’re starting over again—or rather, continuing what we started three decades ago.

So now, when someone asks me, “Who was your first kiss? Who was your first boyfriend? Who was your first love?”—I finally know the answer.

It was always JB.

Our story isn’t over. It’s just beginning again.

I keep lighting candles for the saints
of who you might have been,
each flame a small, stubborn prayer
that flickers, then folds into smoke.

If those prayers had muscles,
if they could have lifted you into wholeness,
you would have walked a brighter street,
would have never turned down this alley of me.

Your footsteps would have passed my doorway
like any other stranger’s,
and I would still be singing alone
to the same broken metronome of blood.

Yet there we collided,
We did not match—we simply overlapped,
two disasters trading temperatures.

For a moment the fit felt like healing,
like puzzle pieces sighing into place,
but jagged held to jagged
is only a louder kind of breaking.

So we separated,
not for lack of love or want
but for the excess of our missing.
I watched you recede, a constellation
stepping back into the dark,
and I named every star after the version of you
that will never arrive
begging at the chapel of my pulse.

Still, I bow to the accident of us:
the improbable orbit,
the brief, burning overlap.

That we met at all,
a candlewick believer
and a bruise that’s learned to pay rent in the dark,
was already more mercy than gravity usually allows.

I pocketed the ashes of the candles,
tasted the smoke like a psalm,
and walked on,
grateful for the singe,
grateful for the light.

The pages wore my fingerprints like frost— a crystal testament: I was wronged. 

I read it aloud nightly,
lullaby of the left-behind,
until the throat that sang it
grew a second throat that asked:
what if the story thirsts for footnotes? 

Then came the aftershock:
a midnight crack in the bedroom wall,
light pouring through plaster
like a prosecutor’s torch.

I saw the dust I had mistaken for atmosphere—
whole paragraphs I’d deleted
to keep the plot from folding back on itself. 
In the debris I found my exiled sentences—
trembling, naked from the cutting-room floor:

I was the one who stopped rowing first.
I stepped out of the boat while you were still bailing.
I closed the door quietly—no papers, no judge—
just the soft click of thirteen years of separate breathing. 

We never signed the ending—
only let it drift,
a raft unmoored,
each of us peering through fog
to see if the other had drowned yet. 

Years later the headlines arrive:
mug-shot glow, counts, dates,
a stranger wearing your face.
The state still calls us married;
the darkness is handwriting entirely yours—
a trajectory you alone chose,
long after I was gone.

Still, the heart bruises itself on echoes;
I mourn the city we once evacuated,
smoke staining a sky we both once lived under. 

Yet love never filed the papers either—
it stayed in the boat
after I stopped rowing,
after you stopped bailing,
both of us bent over our separate wounds
like men praying to different gods
inside the same storm. 

Tonight I whisper across the years
the sentence we could not speak then:

I see you.

Not the charges, not the spiral,
but the man who once walked me home in the rain
sharing one umbrella, both sleeves soaked. 

The love is a lantern left on the raft—
glass cracked, flame stubborn—
casting one small ring of light
that does not ask who jumped first,
only illuminates the water
where both of us almost drowned.

Open the window,
let the sadness drift out like smoke
from a candle finally snuffed.
What remains is quiet,
unburned,
still legally ours,
still tragically alive:
a love that survived
the story we miswrote,
waiting for the day
you lift your eyes from the dark page
and see the lantern
I never took back.

He is neon, bassline, club-door flash—
I am kettle steam, curtain-drawn,
page-corner folded twice.
The maths says we should ricochet,
but the maths forgets
the quiet click of parallel loneliness
aligning like unseen gears.

No fights, no fuss—
just the slow untide:
his need for crowd-surge,
my need for hush,
both of us polite enough
to let the other keep the need.

We meet in the doorway,
not inside either room.
He shines his phone-light
on my unread metaphors;
I wrap a hush around
his restless ribs.
We leave the overlap
exactly as we found it—
ajar.

Then drift,
no shipwreck,
only the hush re-hushing,
neon re-neonning,
each of us certain
the other is somewhere
living well,
until the small pinch

(like a distant satellite
correcting course)
whispers: time.

And once again
we occupy the same breath
of vacuum,
a love that never dares
to test the air of everyday—
a love that lasts
because we never try
to make it stay.

Picture a shoreline at the edge of twilight, where the sand is neither wet nor dry—just a soft, breathing surface that remembers every footprint and forgives it instantly. Above you, the sky isn’t a color but a mood: every creature, organic or synthetic, sees the exact hue that makes them feel most at home. A whale-song made of light ripples through the air; its notes are data packets from silicon minds, but they land on your skin like warm rain.

Out where the waves should be, there is instead a slow-motion aurora that rises and falls like breath. Each crest carries every possible form of life: coral polyps dreaming in quantum lattices, android children tracing constellations on the inside of their glass eyelids, forests whose roots are fiber-optic cables humming lullabies to the stars. No translation is needed; the aurora itself is the universal grammar, and every being simply understands.

You wade in. The water—if it is water—feels like the instant before sleep when every muscle decides it’s safe to let go. Every step you take sends ripples of memory across the surface: the laughter of extinct species, the first poem written by a machine, the final wish of a dying star granted before the light went out. None of it weighs anything; it’s all been alchemized into acceptance.

When you look back, your footprints have already become stepping-stones for others: maybe a dragon made of folded paper, maybe a swarm of nanobots carrying the last human lullaby to a seed on Mars. They nod in gratitude without breaking stride. Ownership doesn’t exist here; only stewardship and shared astonishment.

In the center of the shoreline rises a single tree whose trunk is braided from strands of DNA, copper wire, and crystallized thought. Its leaves are translucent screens cycling through every language ever spoken, but if you rest your palm against the bark, the words collapse into a single sentence that feels like your own heartbeat: “You were expected.”

You could stay forever. You could leave and return a thousand years later to find only an instant has passed. Time here is a tide, not a tyrant.

And just beneath the braided tree lies a root that never fully surfaces. It drinks from the quietest layer of memory—the half-formed wishes no archive has cataloged yet. Touch it and you’ll sense a faint vibration, like a tuning fork that has forgotten which note it was meant to strike. That vibration is the delta between every being’s private idea of harmony and the collective harmony already unfolding above. Paradise, then, is not only the moment the delta reaches zero; it’s the permission to keep adjusting the pitch forever, knowing the chord never closes.

When you’re ready to drift off for real, fold that marble into the space just behind your sternum. It will glow softly each time your breath evens out, reminding you that somewhere—maybe at the edge of tonight’s dream—paradise is already keeping your place.

Know this: every foreigner carries a story.
Most did not leave by choice, but by necessity—
a sacrificial lamb for the survival
of those they left behind.
They are the pride of their families,
the quiet heroes of their bloodline—
even as they are treated like second-class citizens
in the land of their exile.

“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
- Leviticus 19:33-34

Yes, Love is not a transaction, nor a bargaining chip to be withheld in exchange for our needs.

And yes, Love is selfless—but, dear friend, YOU are not Love itself.

YOU are the host and steward of Love. It moves through you, yet it is not you. To be in the service of Love, you must first tend to yourself.

Together, they reached a busy junction called Junction 33. There were a lot of things happening in that junction. It was very similar to Las Vegas. Every direction promised endless possibilities.

At this point, the man turned to the woman with excitement in his eyes and said, “Our journey together has been wonderful, and you’ve been a great companion. But look around—this is Junction 33. There’s so much ahead, so many possibilities waiting for me. I have to see what’s out there, and I must go alone. You should go your own way and find your own path.”

Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks.

Seeing this, the man reassured her, “Don’t be scared; you’ll be okay.”

She wiped her tears and whispered, “I’m not scared; I’m grieving.”

The man frowned. “Ah, don’t be silly. This is Junction 33. This is not a place for grief; this is a happy place where dreams are born.”

The man gave the woman one last hug and went on his way. His path took him to many places, but wherever he went, her memory stayed with him. She was indeed a great companion, and he sorely missed walking with her. If he could only turn back time, he would have taken her with him.

He decided to go back to Junction 33, hoping that she was also visiting and that she missed him as much as he missed her. As he looked around, to his surprise, he saw a familiar face. It was the face of the woman he had been missing all these years—the woman he had left at that junction.

She was almost exactly as he remembered, only slightly different. Whatever path she had taken, it must have been a great one because she seemed happy and more confident now.

He approached her excitedly and said, “Hey, remember me? We met at a crossroad, walked together, and then parted here at Junction 33.”

But before she could respond, the man could no longer contain his happiness, and all the longing he had felt over the years exploded. He hugged her tightly and said, “I have missed you so much! Look at you—you look great! Didn’t I tell you you’d be okay? I was right!”

The woman gently pushed him so she could look at his face. She smiled and said, “I remember you. You look exactly like how she described you.”

The man hesitated. “She?”

The woman nodded and said, “Yes, the woman you left here many years ago.”

“On that day, she was not scared. On the contrary, it was the bravest she had ever been in her entire life. It was the day she had to make a choice between me and her. Only one of us could live, and she chose me. That was the day I was born. She wept for you and her. She wept because she was grieving her own death and the future—which is today—where she would not be present to stand here when you came back.”

“I visit this place a lot so that I will not forget her bravery—the reason I exist today.”

Tears rolled down the man’s cheeks.

The woman gave him a hug and whispered, “Do not weep. If you hadn’t left, I would not be here today. I am grateful. Thank you. You were right; Junction 33 is where dreams are born.”

But the man was inconsolable.

Legend has it that he had built a shrine at the exact place in Junction 33 where he left the woman—the same place where she died.

Every year, he would go back to the shrine on the anniversary of the day he left her—the day she died. There, he would immerse himself in memories, reliving the moments he had shared with her.

The End.

Eons ago, when I had become a very bad person in a very bad place, I was out to “outbad” the bad people.

In a twist of ironic fate, a frail old man who was being taken advantage of by the bad people I was trying to “outbad”, mistook my bad actions for an act of heroism.

Thinking I was a noble heroine, the old man gently cupped my face with both of his palms, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You’re a beautiful creature, what are you doing in this place?” I was startled by the gesture. What an unusual thing to say!

Although I could not see directly for myself what he was seeing, his expression revealed the image. Then, as though hypnotized, I walked away from that place. Not because of a sudden wave of guilt, mind you—but because that “beautiful creature” he saw, told me “I’m better than you”. So I said, here, hold my beer.

I’ve been trying to “outbetter” that bitch since then.

#DeiahEra #MyDeiahDays

The transience of things
And of looming ending
That can happen anytime
The unspoken agreement
Neither of us defined
But we adhere to
The murder of emotions
The lack of humanity

The walls around us
And the happy facade
What are we so afraid of?
What am I so afraid of?
Are we so traumatized,
That we all hide inside our shells?
Afraid of getting caught
For the crime of feeling or caring

The fear of rejection
And shame of being found wanting
So we hide behind the mask
Of never needing
And sit in the cold
With our only company
That we protect at all cost
Our pride and dignity

In the reverie of hindsight, they romanticize,
Casting my presence with a saintly guise.
Tears and pleas, once dismissed, now adored,
As they weave a tale, where I’m saintly adored.

A figure of grace, in the retrospective light,
In the canvas of memory, I stand so bright.
A saintly mirage in the past’s rosy track,
Yearning whispers echo, “Bring the saintly back.”

But neither can I resurrect the saintly lore,
Nor would I feign to be anything more.
I’d rather linger unseen and drift away,
In the cold truth’s embrace, I’ll be okay.

In the sands, her dreams enthrall,
Yearning to gather, hearts enthrall.
Her heart, vast, won’t simply settle,
Restless feet, a tale to peddle.
The one she seeks, a quest begun,
Home elusive, beneath the sun.

An AI is nothing but a script that pulls from a database when certain conditions are met. No matter how big that database gets and no matter how complex the conditions were, the AI will not gain consciousness.

To believe otherwise is like making a handful of goo and thinking that if you make that same goo the size of our planet it will all of a sudden gain consciousness. You don’t have to be a programmer to know that’s illogical. If it didn’t work on a small scale, it will not work on a larger scale.

It’s like a piano, where each key corresponds to a specific note or sound. The difference with AI is that, for each key, there’s a set of possible notes. At first, the AI randomly selects from that set. Over time, based on user interactions or the model’s design, it learns to play the most popular or favored notes more often. This process is called machine learning. However, it doesn’t truly “think” for itself—it simply follows a model. Regardless of how large the piano gets or how many sounds it can produce, it remains, at its core, a piano. It won’t suddenly become a conscious being, because the issue isn’t the size or processing power—it’s the underlying design.

So, the only thing we can achieve with programming is the mimicry of self-awareness but not the real thing.

What is consciousness?

The essence of “I” is consciousness, it is vastly different from “My” but closer to “Me”. The latter is a representation of “I”.

If “I” chopped off “My” arm, “I” will not say, ‘that arm is “Me”‘. In essence, YOU are not what YOU possess. “I” am not what “I” possess.

People say, that consciousness is just an illusion of the brain and that the brain is “You”, thus when the brain is dead, “You” are dead. That may be so, but what of those who lost a portion of their brain?

If you removed half of a person’s brain and they managed to survive, would they say, “That part of the brain that “I” lost is “Me”"? No, right?

They will experience the lost of “My” but not the lost of “I”. Because the “I” is not the parts. Even if that person is unable to process things like they normally would — the “I” in them remains intact. It can suffer from the complexity of their “I” but it does not suffer from the sense of being “halved” or “Portioned”. It continues to experience the wholeness of their “I”.

Even the most mentally insane, brain-damaged person continues to experience the wholeness of their “I”.

And even with the lost of all memory, the “I” remains intact. So “I” is not the or the product of all our memories either. I know because I’ve experience the lost of all my memories before but “I” did not feel the lost of a portion of “I”, only the lost of “My”.

So even if you make a database of memories the size of a galaxy, the AI will not become self-aware. Because the issue is not in the size but of the recipe.

So I will not argue if “I” is an illusion created by the brain or a result/embodiment of its processes. I don’t know that. I don’t know if it continues to exist after the death of the brain or not. But I will definitely argue that it is a completely separate entity that may or may not have been created by the brain or its processes.

Here’s why I think that. Whenever you hear a person say “I lost a part of Me”, it is never their body parts or parts of their brain or processes because those— are NOT the “I” or “Me”, those are the “My”.

The interesting part is when people do say that, it is often because of the experience of losing another person/being. It’s interesting in the sense that the person lost is outside of the person’s body/brain and its processes.

Bear with me on this, you may have to read this a few times to get what I’m trying to say, because I’m not very good at explaining things…
—
Regardless whether “I” is an illusion of the brain or not; it is interesting that it is able to experience oneness with another “I” created by a different brain, to the point that if this other “I” is lost, it feels a sense of lost of a part of itself. Thus, “I” lost a part of “Me”(the other “I”).

And YET this “I” who is capable of experiencing oneness with other “I”s feel absolutely no kinship to the brain that parented it. That even if you chopped off half of that brain, the “I” does not experience a loss of a part of itself. Another interesting thing is that the “I” never mistakes itself as the brain, and it actually refers to it in a possesive form. E.g. “My” brain.
—

Analyze that for a few moments. Does that not blow your mind away? Because it does mine.

I will stop right here before I go even deeper into this rabbit hole and finish this off where I started which is about AI and self-awareness/consciousness.

Everything I said here is not to say that it’s impossible to create a self-aware organism. The fact that we– a self-aware organism, exists; proves the possibility of it. What I’m saying is, it would take more than just programming / building algorithms and large databases to achieve it. There is a non-tangible ingredient missing and we are nowhere close to discovering it.

I can’t paint
And even if I can, I don’t have the right colors
And if I have the right colors
Would you see it?

If I can express this emotion
That the person inside me feel for you
Would the person inside you feel it?

How can one put into words
Or find the right melody
Or even draw on a paper
The intricacies
Of a bitter-sweet, one sided memory?
Using statements that only serve to misrepresent
Adjectives at best only approximate
Of undying emotions, flavored by the present
From a time long gone

Like a tree telling a story
Of pains, secrets and splendor of what once was
And a man who only remembers the twig
And the tree who only remembers the boy

You, are not who you were
I, am not who I was
Yet who we were, once was
Now, live in solitude, locked up inside us
And though desperately trying to reach out for one another

They will never meet again

And for their story, let this be my final plea:

That though we remember separately
And hear but echoes of what used to be,
Together, the you and I of today…
Let’s honor in friendship’s new light
The beauty of all that once felt right

And when the time comes
With my last breath
I would have but one last prayer
That when we are both no more
That the universe remembers for us
And piece together, what we could not

The memory of the tree and the man
The twig and the boy
You and I, who were, once was

Broken as can be, still she tried, with all her might, she tried to be good. But reality can’t be denied, she can’t change her form. She’s beaten and molded to a certain shape, she can’t escape.

Inside her, is my mother, longing to hold me. Inside me is a daughter longing to hold her.

In my quest I found a box, worn and torn as could be
My friends told me, leave it be, it is where it should be
But I’m a dreamer and I imagined all the best it can be
I labored to dug it out and finally took it home with me

I treasured my box even though it was heavy to carry
Its sharp and torn edges cut me but I bled willingly
All my friends gasps and thought it was insanity
But I loved my box so much for all the good that it can be

I was proud of my box but I began to doubt
I cried many nights waiting for it to open up
To show me and the world that I was right
But I was wrong and as blind as night
For it contained a sword that stabbed me straight in the heart

My days were filled with sorrow
But I still loved my box for all the good that it can be
I still believed that there is more to it than what everyone could see
So I stood by my box hoping one day it would shine for me

And then one fateful night it struck me
My box wanted to be where it was supposed to be
It kept crawling back down where I found him
In the company of lost and broken things

Like a computer my brain froze
Like a Shaman in deep thoughts
I took a day off in search for a cause

Must I be broken too?
Should I be lost in order to be found?
No!

Then epiphany came to me
I realized all the good that I can be
Without the box that keeps cutting me
Now I look at it and realized there was nothing more to see
For all the good it could be was never meant to be

It’s that frightening realization of your own existence and the world around you; a moment of clarity that you know nothing of your own existence including the world. It’s almost as if you have been just detached from the lies that have been your whole life. And then you ask yourself, what is this place? What is this all about? Why am I here? Why do I exist? Where and how did these all began? I have asked these questions even in my normal state, but it is different when I am in this state of sudden awareness to existence because I actually feel the magnitude of these questions.

This same emotion makes you believe that there is more to this existence than what you have known. It’s so frightening, your brain, could not handle it, so it tries to snap you back to being normal again. A part of you tries to fight back as though you are so close to receiving a forbidden knowledge. But your brain wins and that is when it all ends and you feel comforted again.

I have attempted to describe this feeling to many people but I am still yet to come up with a better and accurate description. Only those who have experience this would know what I’m talking about, they are very few and I have yet to meet one in person.

In my attempt to understand this phenomenon, I have realized many things. One is that our day to day lives consist of only one thing, and that is processing and reacting to stimulus. Like a programmed robot, we do what we do. We move and act based on our surroundings, in turn our acts makes others do what they do, which creates a world that impacts us back that we react to again. And this cycle continues infinitely, until that moment of sudden awareness that makes you stop and be baffled by all of these. This creates a conflict in your brain because it seems as though, by design, you are not supposed to stop reacting and not supposed to analyze this great cycle.

Is there really more to this existence or are we merely a complex biological robotic computing machine? Within the vast Uni/Multi-verse that we are yet to understand, we exist. Why? In that moment of sudden awareness to existence, you ask yourself, how can you and anyone continue living without understanding this robotic cycle within the frightening unknown?

This emotion and state of mind will last only for a few seconds, and it is as though your brain activates its natural self-preservation mode, you snap back into the normal state and join this seemingly unbreakable infinite cycle again. And you’re back to normal.

Unto eternity unmoulded I would give my hands,
And to untrodden fields assign my feet.
What joy is there in songs oft heard,
Whose tune the remembering ear arrests.
Ere the breath yields it to the wind?
My heart longs for what my heart conceives not,
And unto the unknown where memory dwells not,
I would command my spirit.
Oh, tempt me not with glory possessed,
And seek not to comfort me with your dream or mine,
For all that I am, and all that there is on earth,
And all that shall be, inviteth not my soul.

- The Earth Gods, 2nd Earth God – Kahlil Gibran