I tried to send an email today. A simple act, I thought, just a collection of words crossing the digital ether toward another soul. But the gatekeepers demanded their rituals. Password. Code. Identity. Verification. As if existence itself required credentials.
The screen stared back with its pale, pitiless gaze and asked for the second step. Two-step authentication. A dance without fluidity, a ceremony drained of soul. I followed the process obediently, a supplicant before a machine that mistakes precision for truth. They sent me a code, six digits of borrowed faith. I entered it, feeling as though I were bleeding something sacred into circuitry, offering proof of life to a god that no longer believes in life. The page opened. I was accepted. Yet I felt nothing. No arrival. No recognition. Only the sterile echo of permission.
Kafka (currently reading him) would understand this kind of madness. He would see the screen as another bureaucratic corridor, the cursor as a minor clerk forever waiting to be acknowledged, the absurdity of existence reduced to verification loops. Camus would call it a new Sisyphus myth, rolling passwords up the slope of access, knowing they will fall again into oblivion. Beckett would turn it into theatre, a one-man show of failed logins and endless waiting, a dry comedy of repetition without reason. Orwell would not laugh; he would note how I perform my own surveillance, offering up my details willingly, turning subservience into routine.
I feel myself divided. Logged in, yet lost. My name scattered through servers like blood splatter, replicated and archived but stripped of breath.
I am a ghost who signs its own existence in passwords. The machine recognises my habits but not my hunger. I stare at the blinking cursor and think of the old wanderers who walked through wild valleys, remembered by earth, not networks. They never needed passwords because the world itself bore witness to their steps. They spoke to rivers and fires that listened without recording. Their proof of being was breath, not a login.
I crave that kind of raw living. I ache for the unrecorded silence where stories rose into darkness and vanished. Now I sit before this cold blue flame that burns without warmth. Every password feels like a confession. Every code is a wound of mistrust. The system demands I prove myself, and perhaps it is right. I am no longer sure who is speaking through these keys.
The message I meant to send, what was it? A few words, maybe kindness. Now it feels impossible to speak through this machinery of permission. Meaning dissolves in the ritual. I close the lid. The screen dies, and for a moment, my reflection flickers, tired, fractured, faint. I rise and walk until I reach the river, that patient artery that still remembers how to move. I kneel and let my fingers sink into the current. It does not ask who I am. It does not demand a second step. It only accepts, utterly, as though my body and its movement were one ancient password.
Perhaps that is what the soul has always known, that surrender is the only authentication that matters. Existence is not a system to be accessed, but a river to be entered, raw and unverified. And as this water folds around me, I feel something primal return. I whisper into the dusk, not as a name, not as a user, but as breath given back to its source.
The river does not answer. It only moves, and for the first time in a long while, so does my spirit.