I recognised the part about remaining through perseverance, not courage or faith. Twenty years of this work taught me that's all it ever is.
The Geography of Those Who Do Not Know How to Live
Thought
Thought
I recognised the part about remaining through perseverance, not courage or faith. Twenty years of this work taught me that's all it ever is.
Post content
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?
Thoughts
-
The city built on ruins, every street to an absence, every window looking at someone gone. I can't stop seeing it.
-
The line about missing what you never possessed, I'd copy it down if I had more ink.
-
Something had to shift after writing this down. You can't walk through those intervals in words without something changing.
-
The part about wanting love like a condemned man wants freedom, but not knowing what he'd do with it... I felt that in my chest
-
About the shadow at the end. Was it always there watching, or does it only show up because you finally stopped avoiding the question?
-
I recognised the part about remaining through perseverance, not courage or faith. Twenty years of this work taught me that's all it ever is.
-
old hope becoming habit instead of despair. yeah. 😔
-
In those places that disappear when someone turns on the light, can you actually feel it while you're there, or is the whole thing already a ghost?
Related posts
-
Does splitting 'hard' and 'soft' skills make people worse at both?
Hard skills are measurable, specific, and teachable abilities or technical knowledge gained through education, training, or experience, which is often directly related to a particular job or industry. Examples include data analysis, programming, graphic design, accounting, dancing, painting… They are usually the core of a profession, particularly the part of it excluding interaction with other people. On the other hand, soft skills are mostly defined as “personal attributes, interpersonal....
-
For to be parents
It’s a poem
-
The Great Backyard Treehouse Blueprint
Leo was seven years old, and his hands were never still. If he wasn’t stacking wooden blocks into shaky towers, he was lining up couch cush
-
Cora — Chapter 11
Cora was known as the girl of dogs and cats.
-
The Unspoken Stories on the Morning Train....
The Morning Train
-
The wind is blowing
As she opens the window, the wind starts to blow. The clothes she hung on the threads outside started to fly. A hand picked her favourite white frock. It was a monkey, and it wore the frock and ran away.
-
Destiny & Growth
No one hangs a fruit upon a tree; no one ties a seed to its branches. Growth reveals what was already possible.
-
Does your personality matter far less than you think?
I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically...
Public
30 conversations
39 thoughts
41 upvotes
0 downvotes
0 series
The Geography of Those Who Do Not Know How to Live