The world, that gaudy theatre upon which each soul makes its brief and ill‑fated debut, has ever been an unkind audience to sincerity, yet here I stand, trembling at the footlights, compelled to offer my salutation. “Hello, World” — such a plain utterance, the very embroidery of banality, yet one must dress even the most impoverished phrases in the finest raiment when they are to be paraded before the indifferent masses.
The greeting itself is an absurdity. What is this “world” I am addressing? A pallid audience of mechanical cogs and vapid clockwork? A grotesque masquerade in which every mask is more honest than the face it conceals? A vast drawing‑room in which Death sits at the piano, playing waltzes for lovers too distracted by the scent of roses to notice the decay beneath the petals?
And yet, I greet it. Not out of affection, for affection is a polite lie we tell ourselves when the truth is too awkward to bring to tea. I greet it out of necessity, that greatest of social lubricants. One must always begin somewhere, and if one must begin anywhere, it may as well be at the precipice of futility, pen in hand, voice atremble, casting syllables like lilies onto a river that will forget them before they reach the sea.
So, “Hello, World.” Drink deep of my presence. Admire the form, if not the substance. I shall endeavor, in my limited time, to embroider the otherwise crude fabric of this conversation with a needle tipped in irony, silk thread dyed in melancholy, and a flourish of wit that Death himself might pause to applaud. For every hello is but the echo of a farewell, and every world one greets is already half in shadow.
