I DON’T CARE

In Praise of Indifference

Spring has returned to me the deformed smile of the Idiot. A smile devoid of joy, innocence, and that foolish faith in tomorrow that belongs to those who have not yet learned to distrust life. I watched the flowers bloom as one watches a condemned man climb the scaffold: with the awareness that every beauty is merely a pause granted to decomposition.

I have stopped asking the sky for answers. I have even stopped cursing it. My blasphemies have worn themselves out against a ceiling too high to reach, and my prayers have rotted before they could even reach my lips. There is nothing more ridiculous than a man begging for salvation while secretly cultivating everything within his soul that might condemn him.

So I learned to ask for nothing.

I learned to gather my tears without shedding them, to suffocate my pain before it could become something useful. For pain, when understood, becomes experience; when accepted, it becomes strength. And I have never wanted to be strong. I have wanted to be untouchable.

There is a difference.

Strength presupposes a wound. Untouchability is the lie we tell ourselves when we fear that someone might discover it.

That is why I summoned my own scourges. I called them by name, sat them beside my bed, and offered them the wine of my despair. I asked them to suffocate every dream before it could take shape, to bury every hope beneath layers of sand, mud, and blood. I no longer wanted happiness to catch me by surprise, because happiness has the unforgivable habit of arriving without guarantees and leaving without explanations.

I chose poison over medicine, disillusionment over trust, silence over the possibility of being misunderstood.

And yet, deep down, I knew I was not destroying the world.

I was destroying the possibility that the world might still surprise me.

I watched men chase one another through their petty moral comedies. I saw them kneel before justice, betray one another in the name of love, lie to protect their honesty, and sell themselves to preserve their dignity. I watched their convictions crumble at the first collision with convenience, their promises evaporate the moment they became a burden, their ideals transform into instruments of power.

And I laughed.

Not because I was better than them, but because I needed to believe that I was.

Justice disarmed me. Love poisoned me. Trust taught me suspicion, while disappointment offered me a philosophy comfortable enough to be mistaken for wisdom.

I began calling my bitterness clarity, my inability to trust independence, and my refusal to belong to anything freedom.

I built myself a fortress out of the remains of everything I had ever believed in, then cursed the world because no one came looking for me.

What a magnificent masterpiece of cowardice.

My hand grasps nothing but air. Opportunities pass me by with the same indifference with which I pass by other people. I have learned to recognize happiness only after it has gone, and to call it an illusion so I will not have to admit that perhaps I could have held on to it.

Even the honesty of beggars saddens me.

Not because it is false, but because sometimes it is the last thing left to those who possess nothing else. And I, who pride myself on believing in nothing, still feel an obscene envy toward those who manage to preserve a fragment of humanity without turning it into a source of shame.

The criminals wander about like gelded men, stripped even of the courage to be truly wicked. Respectable men hide behind their virtues, corrupt men behind their necessities, and everyone seems intent on finding a justification elegant enough to spare them the need to look at themselves in the mirror.

I, on the other hand, declare myself whole.

Whole in my arrogance, whole in my anger, whole in my stubborn refusal to grant the world the privilege of hurting me again.

And that is why I don’t care.

Or at least, that is what I keep repeating.

Because indifference is a magnificent garment: it reveals no wounds, demands no explanations, asks for no forgiveness. You need only put it on, and every defeat becomes a choice, every abandonment a voluntary renunciation, every unfulfilled desire definitive proof that it was never worth desiring anything in the first place.

Indifference is the luxury of those who refuse to confess how deeply they once desired something.

And I have worn it for so long that I have forgotten where the mask ends and I begin.

Yet there is a question that continues to haunt me. A question I cannot drown in sarcasm or bury beneath the weight of my convictions.

Who made my tongue so sharp?

Who taught it to wound before being wounded, to destroy before being judged, to find a flaw in everything beautiful and a lie in every sincere word?

Who gave it the power to transform my fear into contempt, my helplessness into condemnation, my loneliness into a sentence passed against all of humanity?

Perhaps it was me.

Perhaps I sharpened every word with the same care with which a prisoner files away the bars of his cell, only to use the blade to carve the names of his jailers into the walls. I learned to speak so I would not have to act, to judge so I would not have to choose, to ridicule the desires of others so I would not have to confess my own.

My tongue became the armed guard of my Laziness.

Not the laziness of the body, which surrenders to sleep and stillness, but the more insidious laziness of the spirit: the laziness of those who no longer wish to try, who would rather be right than be happy, who find in their own despair an imaginary superiority and cling to it like a fallen aristocrat clutching the last remnants of his family crest.

Why try, when I can declare everything meaningless?

Why love, when I can anticipate betrayal?

Why hope, when I can prove that all hope is naïve?

Why truly live, when I can content myself with observing life and feeling superior to those who still have the courage to participate in it?

Here lies my masterpiece: I have constructed a worldview in which I cannot be defeated, because I have eliminated every possibility of victory in advance.

I take no risks, therefore I lose nothing.

I desire nothing, therefore I suffer nothing.

I believe in nothing, therefore I am never disappointed.

And while I congratulate myself on this supposed freedom, something inside me continues to rot.

It is not hope. Not anymore.

It is the part of me that still wishes to be proven wrong.

The part that, despite everything, waits for a gesture capable of cracking my certainties, a voice untouched by convenience, a gaze before which my cynicism is exposed for what it truly is: not a superior form of intelligence, but a desperate defense against the possibility of feeling again.

Perhaps I do not want to be saved.

Perhaps I do not even want to be understood.

I only want someone, someday, to look at me without believing my words. Someone who sees the man behind the irony, the longing behind the contempt, the fear behind my ostentatious indifference. Someone with the courage not to mistake my refusal for an absolute truth.

But that is a desire, and I have learned to hate desire itself.

So I return to my silence, put my contradictions back in order, and once again wear the smile of the Idiot. Spring continues to bloom, men continue to lie, and the world continues to turn without asking my permission.

And I continue to repeat the two words that have protected me from everything I feared losing.

I don’t care.

I don’t care about love, justice, hope, humanity, or its pitiful inner revolutions.

I don’t care about what I could have been.

I don’t care about what I will never be.

I don’t care about anything.

And yet, if I truly didn’t care about anything, why would I need to repeat it so often?

Perhaps genuine indifference has no need to proclaim itself. It writes no manifestos, summons no scourges, seeks no witnesses. It does not struggle to prove its own invulnerability.

It simply feels no need to defend itself.

I, on the other hand, keep talking.

I keep wounding with words, judging with arrogance, justifying myself through despair. I keep calling fate what might simply be a choice postponed, and clarity what might simply be fear.

And so I am left with a single question, the only one my tongue cannot render harmless:

If I truly don’t care about anything, why do I spend my life searching for reasons to prove it?