borI Was Born with a Fear of the Soul

From the moment I could understand anything, someone — perhaps a boy around my age — told me that every person has a soul.

But what is the soul? He couldn’t explain it.

So I asked my mother.

She was deeply superstitious, and scolded me harshly for speaking of ghosts or death.

Yet the more mysterious and forbidden adults made it, the more curious and obsessed we children became.

Some kids said the soul was a ghost — like a shadow that’s always behind you, a clawed, fanged monster that could take your life in an instant.

For a while, I was terrified of my own shadow.

I couldn’t shake it.

At night, I was too scared to sleep alone, too afraid to turn off the lights.

It felt like something was always hiding in the corner of my room.

A neighbor’s wolf-dog would howl deep into the night.

Its mournful cry pierced my skin and bone, haunting my dreams and jerking me awake in cold sweat.

But I couldn’t have my mother sleeping next to me forever.

I was growing up — a boy no less — and I had to be brave.

Still, even now, I can’t erase the horror of being haunted by the idea of a soul.

One night, in a countryside bedroom, under the mosquito net, I angrily slapped and killed a mosquito that had bitten me five times.

I watched its body flatten and burst in an instant.

A life — gone, just like that.

Staring at the blood and tiny limbs in my palm, I shivered.

That was the first time I truly felt the weight of the word “soul.”

Life is so fragile. Death is easy.

Living is hard.

This applies to mosquitoes, and to humans.

If there’s no soul, how can we bear the thought of facing eternal darkness and nothingness after death?

To never, ever live again?

But if souls do exist, surely they’re not unique to humans.

Then what defines the boundary of a soul’s vessel?

Do all living things — plants, animals, microbes — have souls too?

Our bodies see countless cells die and regenerate every day.

Does every cell carry a soul?

What if the microscopic world is infinitely expansive — each cell a universe with its own stars and planets, its own life and death cycles, its own intelligent beings striving to understand the unfathomable vastness of their “cellular cosmos”?

And perhaps our own universe is nothing more than a cell within some grander being.

A terrifying thought.

If souls are real, how does your soul relate to the trillions within your body, or the infinite souls in the infinite worlds nested within you?

If souls are immortal — if reincarnation is real — then who will you be in your next life?

A god-like giant encompassing universes?

Or a micro-being living inside a cell inside a bacterium inside this one?

Or is “soul” just a beautiful lie — told to comfort us, to help us overcome the terror of death,

and simply… live?