አይ ህይወት!

I am one of those people who understands things slowly—painfully slow, dare I say. Whether it’s happiness, sadness, grief, or loss, it starts to get to me slowly. Or I can go unbothered for months, and then it hits me all at once, like a tsunami. Now, I can feel two things building up inside of me with every breath I take: regret and resentment. Both, indigestible. Both, irreversible!

I learned about life’s irony early on, but I came to understand it much, much later. Life has a way of teaching you lessons in the cruelest ways. During my medical days, my first patient was a soldier who had stepped on a landmine during her first deployment. She lost most of her toes and part of her calf. And her name was “ቦጋለች”. Oh, the irony!

Now, I am sitting here, writing this, feeling every bit of the weight life has placed on my shoulders—feeling the emptiness of this gaping hole I am trying to survive in. The cruel irony of life, gives no patience to those named “ትዕግስት”. “ሰላምች” are basically ፀረ-ሰላም , and “ቅዱስ” and ቅድስት” are spawns of Satan. (Dear reader, if your name is one of these, don’t take it personally. I am just venting from experience—you might be an exception.) But the cruelest joke of all is “ህይወት” losing her “ህይወት”. Why be so cruel to someone who had so much ahead of her?

“Losing a beloved is like an amputation.” I read in ‘A Grief Observed’ It all feels cruel and painful!

 “Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face.” I read some more.

I suppose life finds its humor in tragedy. Loss isn’t just about the absence of someone or something—it’s a haunting, a cruel ghost that lingers in the corners of your mind, waiting to pull you into its cold embrace when you least expect it. Regret gnaws at you with teeth as blunt as time, making you relive every ‘what if’ and ‘if only.’ Grief, on the other hand, is patient. It doesn’t rush. It waits, creeping through your veins like a slow poison, dulling everything until all that’s left is emptiness—a void where once there was meaning.

And hope? Oh, hope. The ultimate stand up comedy. They tell you to hold onto it, cling to it as if it’s a life raft in an endless ocean of despair. But what they don’t tell you is that sometimes hope is the heaviest burden of all. Because hope means believing that there’s something left, something better waiting out there. But what if there isn’t? What if all we’re left with is the absurdity of it all—a life without meaning, a life that drifts by without purpose, and losses that pile up like forgotten debris?

Maybe that’s life’s greatest irony: that we keep living despite knowing it’s all pointless. We endure loss, regret, and grief, convincing ourselves that there’s a reason behind it, when in truth, there’s nothing but randomness. The absurdity lies in the fact that even though we know none of this matters, we still get up, breathe, and carry on.

Perhaps the cruelest part of it all is how life doesn’t stop. It doesn’t wait for you to catch up. The sun rises, cars honk, people laugh, and the world moves forward, indifferent to your suffering. That’s the joke, isn’t it? That in this grand, chaotic play, we’re nothing but worm foods waiting for our turns.

But maybe that’s where we find a glimmer of peace—not in hope or meaning, but in accepting our temporary meat suit is part of the dirt we will become someday. There’s no grand lesson, no cosmic justice waiting for us at the end of this road. There’s just life, raw and unfiltered, laughing in our faces. And perhaps, the only way to win is to laugh back.