The Glass Dome

One day, someone told me they couldn’t understand what my great anguish with the world was. Perhaps I don’t understand it either. Since then, I’ve been trying to decipher what, exactly, weighs so heavily upon my existence.

Perhaps it’s the limit. The invisible walls, the silent domes that enclose my experience of being in the world. Everything, in one way or another, seems to return to a sense of lack. There is something missing—something that escapes me, something I cannot name. A haunting emptiness, not rooted in pain, but in the persistent awareness of an unreachable beyond.

I feel a yearning to live other lives, to inhabit different perspectives, to perceive reality through eyes that aren’t mine. I long to feel emotions that don’t belong to me, to think thoughts that weren’t born within me. I want to dissolve the edges of my identity, to become porous, receptive—more than just myself. And yet, I remain confined, limited to a single version of being, a single lens.

I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of the world and its subtleties—I remain tethered to a reality that has become dull, predictable, worn from overexposure.

And so I ask myself: how can I escape my own existence? How can I discover other realities, other ways of being? I genuinely wonder if it’s even possible. The world seems vast, enigmatic, and yet elusive and untouchable. And at times, I fear this isn’t just a feeling—but a truth. Not because I am lacking, but perhaps because we are all inherently limited—eternally enclosed within the fragile walls of our own consciousness.

I feel I do too little in the world. That I let experiences, places, freedoms and affections pass me by. I am locked inside myself, and I don’t know if there is a key. I don’t even know if there is a lock. Maybe I have become the lock.

I don’t hate my life, nor my body or the being I inhabit. There is joy within me, small yet sincere. But alongside it, a persistent sense of absence—one that deepens every time I think. And I think too much. I’m searching for something perhaps unreachable: a broader way of existing, something more expansive, more sensitive, almost omniscient.

What troubles me most is a phrase that echoes endlessly through my thoughts: “I could be more.” I am happy, but I could be more. I am free, but I could be more. Everything I am carries this notion of incompleteness. And it is this could that unsettles me—because I don’t know where the boundary lies: between the possible and the impossible, between my will and the world’s silence.

I could. But does it depend solely on me?

Sometimes, I long for a response. A map, a direction. Or simply to hear someone say: “It doesn’t depend on you.” Maybe peace lies in that—acknowledging that not all paths are meant to be walked. Maybe not everything needs to be reached. But still, I ache for the answer to the question: “What must I do to become more?”

For now, I coexist with the weight of this question and the quiet agony of stasis. The world spins, pulses, evolves—and I remain still, as if suspended in time.

I watch everything unfold around me, a silent spectator of a play I long to enter. Life slips by, and I don’t know how to grasp it. Everything is in motion, and I feel like a ghost of potential, frozen while the universe rushes past.

I wish I could be more. I wish I could express more. But there’s something—a glass dome—that separates me from the world. I can see it, press my hands against it, feel its cold curve. But I cannot pass through. And so I remain, quietly hoping for a crack. A fracture. A way out.