Somewhere back in time, when I was still a teenager, I started having daydreams. They were either things that haunted me or things that passed by without ever freezing for a moment. After many years, I realized it was just my mind — unable to form thoughts in plain text. My brain was thinking in pictures, moving or still. Sometimes they were images without meaning at first sight, but now I understand. Now I know how to translate. That’s a beautiful system I’ve learned to adore.

One of the daydreams I started having in high school was about being a truck driver. I remember seeing myself driving a Mack truck down the highway, late at night. I was passing under yellow overpass lights, and the radio was playing music on low volume. I was driving alone, with my deep thoughts standing still inside a massive vehicle, while the world rushed past me. For some, it would seem fast; for others, slow. Speed is relative to time — and time doesn’t really exist, I was thinking. It’s just how you perceive life. That’s all there is to it.

After a while, driving through midnight, I remember stopping at a gas station. It was an old one, on the side of a silent road — one of those with half-blinking neon lights. I parked in the empty lot and went inside to pay for fuel. A tired figure of a man stood behind the cash register, staring at me with absolute boredom. At first, his rusty face manipulated my mind. I thought he was smoking, but he wasn’t. The cigarette was missing from his mouth — yet his face was screaming smoke.

I paid in cash. We didn’t speak. I resumed my trip.

It was a journey to an unknown destination, but for some reason, I knew it would end there. A long, monotonous ride in a powerful truck, with no company, no sympathy, and no expectations. No goals. No masters. Just keep going until the final destination.

I can still smell the fuel at that gas station. I can still see the foggy lights painting the emptiness of the void.

And then — suddenly — I’m somewhere else. Running to take cover inside a tunnel, in a place I’ve never visited in real life. Sirens are howling in the distance. It’s daylight, but everything looks grayed out — like a heavy cloud has filtered the sun, like a camera filter over reality. I see small pieces falling from the sky. I realize it’s nuclear rain, and we’re all trying to hide. Maybe it’s an atomic bomb, maybe a meltdown at a nearby reactor.

The scene ends in a post-apocalyptic silence. I exit the tunnel to see dead bodies and a world that, just yesterday, took a step toward its own demise. I find myself climbing around the collapsed entrance of the now-destroyed tunnel, realizing that everything is gone.

I’ve never actually dreamt these realities. Yet I’ve lived with them. They feel like leftover tech-debt functions in the code of my brain. Remnants of a cleanup. A quick format. Imprints of overwritten data on my memory. A glitch in the matrix. Or maybe just my mind, thinking in images before decoding them into words.

The truth is, from an early age, I found myself to be a receiver of information — possibly cosmic — written into my DNA. The instinct of survival and the agony of death, deeply engraved into the memory locations of my brain.

The Mack truck: proof of the power we carry as humans. Hard to stop. Capable of crushing everything — depending on how it’s driven. The driver: a gifted failure of flesh. A slave to emotional misconfigurations. A pawn in a game of colors, smells, and emotions. A driver indirectly driven by a blend of unrelated factors. The man at the cash register: a reflection of a tired self, or a symbol of the species. Cold. Speechless.

All of them — indifferent and unique, yet so similar. Navigating the human condition. Trying to cope with life’s riddles, with unclear questions. Why?

And then there’s the journey. A route to nowhere. One that must be completed, accompanied only by a strange, silent friend — the self-inflicted mirror.

Since childhood, I was brainwashed to believe that the end would come from a great war. I was raised in a place where bloodshed was inhaled like air. I was constantly trying to escape that reality. I was around when the Chernobyl accident happened — close enough to feel the anxiety in the atmosphere. The fear of war was injected into my blood from birth. Along with a permanent state of alert.

My consciousness has always seemed one step ahead of my intelligence. Humanly proactive. Spiritually prepared.

If you zoom out, you’ll see: human existence is drenched in agony — a form of suffering. The mind never stops reminding the body of the distant, brutal past, when survival was the only priority.

And perhaps that’s how it was. And maybe that’s how it will always be.