Wandering around, wondering—
If no one can act outside what shaped them,
then who do we blame?
What is cruelty
when intention dissolves into origin?
A fist raised isn’t born in the wrist—
it travels,
from a father’s silence,
a society’s hunger,
a thousand quiet rejections
threaded into one explosive need
to be felt.
Even the cruelest man
was once just trying
to feel safe.
So what do we do
with punishment,
with forgiveness,
when both ask us to pretend
we had choices?
They say she left
because I wasn’t enough.
But did she choose that?
Did she know her reasons?
Did I know mine
when I withdrew,
when I stilled,
when I became smaller
than the man she wanted?
It was never a choice.
It was a momentum.
A wave neither of us saw until it broke.
Wandering around, wondering—
How do you cry in front of your parents
and still feel like a fracture
in their dream of a son?
They say the words—
love, pride—
but you hear the space between them,
the part where you didn’t become
what the world told them a child should be.
Even that disappointment
wasn’t theirs to choose.
They too were shaped.
They too inherited the script.
So who am I to be angry?
And yet—
anger comes.
So what can anyone be,
but a consequence?
Wandering around, wondering—
How do you trust someone
when you see the scaffolding behind their voice?
When you watch their affection flicker—
not out of betrayal,
but out of their own unseen storms?
It’s not that they’re lying.
It’s worse.
They mean it.
But they’d mean something else
if they were built differently.
And you know that.
You see it.
So you sit there,
trying to receive the love,
while your mind dissects the source.
What is love,
if it’s just coping that fits for a while?
What is loyalty,
if it ends the moment their fear shifts shape?
Even the ones who ghost you,
who confuse you,
who don’t call back—
you see it:
it was never personal.
It was their wiring,
their conditioning,
their unfinished stories speaking louder than they could.
And you?
Even your silence,
your withdrawal,
your craving for distance—
it’s not a choice either.
It’s the cost of seeing too much.
Wandering around, wondering—
Why does knowing strip away belonging?
Why does empathy isolate?
They want good and evil.
You see variables.
They want heroes.
You see inputs and reactions.
So now,
you move through life
like a ghost with skin—
present, but not quite here.
Because once you see
what moves people,
you stop believing in what they say.
Not because they’re false—
but because they’re real,
and real is made of parts
they’ve never seen.
And that’s the wound.
Not betrayal.
Not abandonment.
Just the unbearable clarity
that no one’s home
behind their own eyes.
And maybe neither are you.
—Parth B.