What It Means to Be Human
The night had a cheap kind of beauty, the kind that flickers on wet asphalt and pretends it’s eternal. Somewhere, a cat yawned against the dark, and the city kept humming, half-asleep, half-guilty. You could almost believe the world was at peace if you didn’t know better.
Being human is knowing better. It’s walking through a storm and still noticing the way the rain hits a lamppost, the way it glows like a small apology. It’s the weight of memory sitting in your pocket like loose change, useless to trade for anything, but you keep it anyway.
Most people spend their lives rehearsing lines someone else wrote. They call it progress, ambition, decency. But all I see are actors forgetting the plot. They chase meaning through screens and slogans, thinking the right kind of noise will drown out the silence. It never does.
I’ve seen men break over a child they lost. I’ve seen women smile through tears after giving birth. I’ve seen love reduced to contracts and faith turned into merchandise. But I’ve also seen a student laugh when the teacher handed her an F, and for a second the whole universe took a breath. Maybe that’s it, what it means to be human. Not to win, not to understand, but to pause. To feel. To be wounded and keep walking anyway.
There’s no manual, no map. Just the long road, the bruised heart, the cigarette ember that won’t go out. The trick is not to look for heaven, it’s to stay awake here, on this imperfect planet, and still see the stars.
That’s what it means to be human: to keep your word when it costs you, maybe with the few people you can stand to be real with; to lose everything and still refuse to turn into stone; to walk through the rain, knowing it will stop eventually, and even if it doesn’t, to keep walking anyway. Because you know the rain washes the dirt from under your fingernails and keeps your soul clean for the next half hour or so.