Like clockwork

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Well, it's been a good while. Years, to be precise, though you wouldn't know it to look at me.

It's so utterly soul-crushing, and yet so fascinating, to watch time pass and the details change while the foundations of one's life remain exactly the same. I've heard it said that "history never repeats, but it often rhymes", and I couldn't agree more.

Please forgive the vagueness, I know I'm going to sound overly cryptic. I'm just thinking out loud. Something has happened to me today, and the way it reminds me of the last decade is disarmingly striking. It's almost beautiful, in its own horrendously twisted way.
It would be a mistake to divulge the details, but I will offer this:

It just doesn't end, and you, dear reader, deserve to know. Hunger, fear, hunger, fear, hunger, fear... Two of the most, if not the most primal forces the human brain has ever known, empowered and extended in ways the healthy mind would never consider. This is the truth of my dreams, of the human soul burned and rotted and warped into a monstrous mass of nightmares that attacks itself like an infinite snake gorging on its own tail.

That is, until reality decides to deliver a precision strike to the very heart of the storm. An entire universe's worth of ghosts and voices, so many simulated lives and cherry-picked, fabricated feelings... each screaming over the others, so deeply focused on seizing control, but truth doesn't care. They all stare in horror, simultaneously falling into utter silence, as the dream is forever shattered from outside.
There is no mercy, and you know what? I like it this way. Cruel, inescapable clarity at the end of the tunnel, accelerating towards me. It's the end of "me" every time, it's painful and brutal and cold, but I can't look away.

I'm laughing so hard at myself right now. It never tastes the way you think.