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Life Bled, Death Whispered, God Watched — Point-Blank

Today was rather cold. It's not uncommon for January mornings to be bone-chilling and windy, but today, I could feel the wind pass through my sweater, hit me point-blank, and extinguish the remnants of heat that my skin and bones radiated.

Hitting at point-blank, being hit at point-blank—both are mutually exclusive events, but there's a contradiction; both are cohesive too. When a bullet leaves a gun and pierces the flesh of a living entity, it not only splatters the blood of its victim but also ravages the innocence of the perpetrator. When a lion tears the flesh of a dying deer, it not only eats parts of its prey but preys on parts of itself, too. When I am long lost in this smoke, when this nicotine roll burns in my hand, it's not the only thing burning. Death always occurs in pairs, but neither entity ends the same way as the other, and it's rarely instantaneous. It's more of a slow, gruesome, tragic, yet cinematic event.

Death is always violent. Sometimes, it arrives with a scream, a sudden rupture in the fabric of existence, tearing away what was once whole. Other times, it creeps in quietly, unnoticed, a slow suffocation rather than a single, decisive cut. But even when silent, it is never gentle. It is an unraveling, a force that wrenches life away, leaving only remnants behind. Whether a grand spectacle or a whisper in the dark, death is an act of destruction, stripping away what was and replacing it with absence. Death is eternal too, something that life isn't. Life is like a facade, a fleeting illusion that dances upon the surface of time, fragile and impermanent. It promises continuity but delivers only transience, while death lingers in the background, unchanging, inevitable, and absolute.

A few days ago, I saw crows feeding on the intestines of a dead rat when a cat jumped and tore that crow apart in a bloody fashion. That's somewhat metaphorical as well as an insult to life. It's metaphorical if you see the rat as good, the crows as evil, and the cat as the one above all, coming to rescue the corpse of good when evil has ravaged it utterly. But it's more of an insult when the crow, the rat, and the cat are all life. It's certainly an insult to life itself when life kills itself while trying to preserve itself. But death always seems to bring nobility with it. Once the rat was dead, its fire of life extinguished, it was no longer just another creature scurrying for survival; it became something more, a silent testament to the inevitability of fate. Death elevates the mundane, turning even the most insignificant being into a solemn echo of what once was. 

In its wake, life mourns, reflects, and sometimes even finds meaning in what was lost. But the paradox remains—death, though noble in its finality, is still a ruthless lord, engulfing existence without remorse, without hesitation, with absoluteness, with sheer power. Talking about power, let's talk about someone who's above it all.

Is there someone above it all? Does God exist? Deep down, I've always felt that yes, they do, and certainly, they don't like to be bored. They say that everything that happens is according to their wish, but why would an all-protecting father wish for his child to be massacred and lynched by a group of militants? Why would an all-loving mother let her daughter be raped and brutally murdered in her college? Then comes the convenience of referring to the karmic cycle and hammering the responsibility not only of one's actions onto oneself but also of the atrocities and crimes committed against them. If everyone is responsible not only for their actions but also for those committed by others, who’s responsible? They? Others? God? Are we all gods? Or is God one of us?

I'm certainly not an atheist, as you can sense, but I'm certainly not a blind believer either. To believe in something is a sacred act, in my perspective, and I can't let it be washed down to simply following a hefty set of rules prescribed by people who were prescribed those rules by someone else. I can't let this sacred, intimate connection between me and my creator be watered down to a monotonous transaction where I ask them for things and hope they give them to me. If someone truly loves and knows you and is all-loving and all-knowing, shouldn’t they also know what’s right for you? What do you need? Who are you? 

Deep down, I know God is always with us, but some part of me thinks they might have forsaken us—forsaken us for making a joke out of His world, forsaken us for burning His land down to ashes while building skyscrapers that touch the heavens, as if trying to replace Him. Forsaken us for drowning in greed, for carving borders into the earth He gave us whole. Maybe we were given paradise, and in our arrogance, we turned it into ruin. And yet, despite it all, some part of me still hopes—hopes that even in our darkest moments, He hasn’t truly abandoned us but waits for us to find our way back. 

But what if we haven't been forsaken? What about the possibility of indifference? Can we neglect the possibility that God is indifferent towards us? Certainly, the master of the universe has an extremely big playground to entertain Himself with and an infinite list of responsibilities and chores to attend to. What if our creator is simply too busy to care about what their utterly insignificant, dust-like, flickering 8 billion small pieces of candles are doing on a random rocky amalgamation of matter, drifting around a star that’s present in a galaxy that is one of several billion others?

Maybe they do love us, maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re too bitter towards us due to the atrocities we’ve committed in their name, maybe they’re too indifferent to care about some of their infinitely many creations. Or maybe, just maybe, they have some other reasons that we simply can’t comprehend and make sense of. But I’d like to ask my kind a simple question: why not put some of this effort towards understanding each other? Why not try to help and please each other the same way we’re trying to please the one in the clouds? Or is our devotion a prop—a tool for us to justify our selfish actions or seek forgiveness? Do we believe in God, or are we just trying to look like we believe in them? And if we truly believe in them, why not believe in each other? Why not believe in ourselves?

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