Agroboy
I am not quite the man you take me for
- Apr 30, 2026
- 30
I am sitting on this bench when, suddenly, the world loses its shape. What I once called a "root" no longer exists; the word has slipped away from the thing like old paint peeling off. What I see sinking into the earth is not part of a tree: it is a black, knotted, brutish mass — an obscene existence staring back at me.
I look around. The bench, the grass, the people passing by: everything feels excessive. As though reality itself had become a warm, thick paste silently overflowing from every corner. None of this needed to be here. This chestnut tree has no reason to exist. Neither does this bench. And I least of all: merely one more volume, a mistake taking up space.
People walk as if they carried a destiny, hidden behind names, clothes, habits. But now all of that seems like a fragile illusion. I see only flesh existing — as gratuitously as the root, the bench, the damp earth. There is no beauty in it, only a suffocating abundance.
Existence is no longer an idea. It invades me physically. It enters through my nose, weighs upon my lungs, clings to my skin. It is like drowning in a sea of things that will not stop being. I try to sleep, to forget, to escape contact with myself, but I cannot ignore the weight of my hand, the useless volume of my body.
Then I understand: Nausea is not before me. It does not come from things.
I am Nausea.
I am this excess without purpose, this surplus of matter abandoned in the world with nowhere to go.
a reinterpretation of "Nausea" by Sartre
What are things to us when we neither need nor desire them? Something gray, colorless, tasteless, I suppose. To me, that is the raw and gratuitous presence of existence itself.
I say this because death feels so concrete, and yet it no longer causes anguish. To live or to die — both seem entirely valid to me.
I look around. The bench, the grass, the people passing by: everything feels excessive. As though reality itself had become a warm, thick paste silently overflowing from every corner. None of this needed to be here. This chestnut tree has no reason to exist. Neither does this bench. And I least of all: merely one more volume, a mistake taking up space.
People walk as if they carried a destiny, hidden behind names, clothes, habits. But now all of that seems like a fragile illusion. I see only flesh existing — as gratuitously as the root, the bench, the damp earth. There is no beauty in it, only a suffocating abundance.
Existence is no longer an idea. It invades me physically. It enters through my nose, weighs upon my lungs, clings to my skin. It is like drowning in a sea of things that will not stop being. I try to sleep, to forget, to escape contact with myself, but I cannot ignore the weight of my hand, the useless volume of my body.
Then I understand: Nausea is not before me. It does not come from things.
I am Nausea.
I am this excess without purpose, this surplus of matter abandoned in the world with nowhere to go.
a reinterpretation of "Nausea" by Sartre
What are things to us when we neither need nor desire them? Something gray, colorless, tasteless, I suppose. To me, that is the raw and gratuitous presence of existence itself.
I say this because death feels so concrete, and yet it no longer causes anguish. To live or to die — both seem entirely valid to me.
