The Geography of Those Who Do Not Know How to Live
I never learnt how to live.
Perhaps no one ever did.
Perhaps we call it existence
the long repetition of gestures
we perform before discovering
that they lead nowhere.
I was born too late for hope
and too early for oblivion.
Since then,
I have inhabited a kind of interval.
I belong neither to the streets
nor to the silence.
I am a guest in places
that disappear whenever someone turns on the light.
That is where I reside:
between the echo of a voice
and the voice that no longer exists,
between the shadow of a body
and the body that left,
between what I desired
and what I was afraid to desire.
There is a particular cruelty
in remaining alive
when one expects nothing more from life.
Hope, when it grows old,
does not necessarily become despair.
Sometimes it becomes habit.
And there are habits more difficult to kill
than any hope.
I carry within me
a city built upon ruins.
Every street leads to an absence.
Every window looks towards someone
who never came back.
Every room preserves the scent
of something that ended
without ever having truly begun.
It is strange to realise
that we can miss
what we never possessed.
Perhaps that is
the purest form of melancholy:
to long for a life
that was never ours.
My desires have grown old as well.
They no longer scream.
They no longer beg.
They remain somewhere inside me
like rusted coins
in the pocket of a dead man.
I can still touch them.
I can still feel them.
But I can no longer spend them.
I desire love
as a condemned man desires freedom:
not because he knows what he would do with it,
but because he needs to believe
that there is a door.
And perhaps there isn't.
Perhaps every door is merely
an architectural form of our illusion.
Perhaps freedom is simply
the elegant name we give
to the interval between two prisons.
So I remain.
Not through courage.
Not through faith.
I remain because even abandonment
requires a certain perseverance.
The night knows me by name.
The shadows no longer frighten me.
They have learnt to live with me.
Sometimes they sit beside me
and say absolutely nothing.
It is the most honest conversation
I have ever had.
Then I wonder:
what if life was never meant
to be understood?
What if understanding were merely
another way of destroying
the little mystery that keeps us breathing?
Perhaps I am not lost.
Perhaps there is nowhere
to return to.
Perhaps this sensation of absence
is the only form of presence
I was ever given.
Dawn arrives.
The world begins once again
to pretend that tomorrow matters.
I remain before the window.
Outside, someone laughs.
A car disappears around the corner.
A woman closes her curtains.
A man lights a cigarette.
And for a few seconds
everything seems unbearably alive.
Then I notice a shadow behind me.
It was not there before.
I do not turn around.
Because there is one question
I have spent my entire life avoiding:
if everything I have lost
continues to live inside me...
then who, exactly,
is living
when I am no longer there?