The Geography of Those Who Do Not Know How to Live

readsOnTheTrain · 2026-08-12T12:58:46.061624Z

The city built on ruins, every street to an absence, every window looking at someone gone. I can't stop seeing it.

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?

Thought

Thoughts

Thought

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