I.
They said the fees would kill us. Now they're gone.
Forty-five percent this year, the data swears.
I used to time my swaps before the dawn,
counting gwei like coins in a red envelope,
saved for a wedding, spent on a rumor, gone.
I used to grieve twelve dollars for a trade,
now the mempool clears in half a breath
of what it cost when every candle bled
red and I called that risk a kind of faith.
I thought cheap gas would fix the hollow part,
the one that measured worth by what I paid
into a chain that never asked my heart.
But grief don't need a fee to make it true.
I miss the ache. I miss believing, too.

II.
My uncle used to say the toll's the point.
You pay for passage, not the thing you buy.
He meant the ferry fare, the temple joint
incense you burn and watch dissolve to sky.
I thought I understood him, back when gas
meant thirty dollars gone to send you five.
Now everything's so cheap it moves too fast
to feel like sacrifice, like being alive.
The L2s hum. The rollups do their work.
Nobody prays before they send a trade.
I miss the version of me that could feel the hurt
of watching value vanish, unafraid
to call it tuition, call it a kind of rent
paid to a god I never quite believed I meant.

III.
So here's to cheap gas, and the death of dread,
to swaps that clear before I've caught my breath,
to every degen who once nearly bled
their rent into the mempool, cheating death
by half a gwei, by luck, by holding on.
Something in me misses being scared.
Not the losing. Just the feeling, gone
the way conviction goes when no one's dared
to lose enough to know if they believe it.
Cheap is not the same as safe, I've learned.
It just means fewer chances to receive it,
the ache that told me something here was earned.
GM, I guess, to a market with no cost.
I'm not NGMI. I think I'm just lost.