Condemnation

on the freedom no one asked for

Mother I have no home.

Only doorways I never walked through.

Only songs I hummed because I couldn’t finish the words.

Mother I don’t believe in prophets.

Only in people

who speak like they’ve died before

and came back with no answers.

…

I foresee my life folding in on itself. The faces I love becoming memory before they have finished being present, the silence growing in the space where words were once spoken with something resembling belief. I am a man lost in the wilderness of his own soul, without compass or map. Even the stars above, once fixed and eternal, now flicker and fade.

I am lost. Not in the world, not in streets or noise or the ordinary disorientation of a life without direction. Lost inside a quiet torment that has no geography, no exit, no point of entry one can locate and therefore cannot seal.

The sun comes this morning the way it always does. And it arrives breaking through the clouds and reaching for me. Seeming like it’s searching for me. It touches the skin. Searching for something lost, or perhaps something never found in me. Searching for a trace of warmth beneath my armor of apathy, or maybe a flicker of life beneath the weight of my own indifference. But there was nothing to find. Only a hollow echo in a chest that has long forgotten how to beat with hope.

It touches my skin as if it’s asking for forgiveness, as if warmth could erase the years of cold, the nights spent wandering through shadows I cannot outrun. The sun tries to understand, but it can’t—It is too distant, too detached from blood and ruin.

And I mean this without bitterness, the way one states a simple fact about incompatible things. The sun does its work. I watch it do its work. We have nothing further to say to each other.

It doesn’t understand pain, pain that makes people talk like prophets. They pretend it teaches, that it carves wisdom into the bones, that the wound becomes the eye that sees clearly. They have built an entire architecture of consolation around this idea. I have looked for this. I have waited for the lesson with the patience of someone who has been promised something and is trying to believe the promise.

But all pain ever taught me was that pain exists. It doesn’t open your eyes. It just makes you blink slower. It doesn’t give you morality, it just strips away your illusions of it.

I wake each day and feel the weight of it pressing down, this unbearable nothing that masquerades as life. There is no light in the morning, only the same pale gray that stretches endlessly. I am here, present in body, absent in will. The choice to move, to decide, to live with intention…these are words I once understood, now they are shadows I cannot grasp.

I watch myself from somewhere outside, a stranger trapped inside this body of doubt. I look at the hands, the coffee, the morning, the bottle, the walls. I see the walls closing in, slowly. I see a life not built but unraveling. I see it clearly, and clarity, as has been established, changes nothing.

I do not move, because every step seems to lead me deeper into the labyrinth I cannot escape. I do not speak, because every word feels like a lie I tell myself to keep the darkness at bay.

I lack the wisdom to say yes or no.

I lack the strength to choose, to break free, to undo the knots in my chest.

I am lost.

Not in the world, not in the streets or the noise—

But lost inside a quiet torment, and I see the ruin ahead.

There is no faith in salvation here, no trust in redemption. Only the slow cold certainty that I am alone, alone with the terrifying freedom to choose, alone with the burden of responsibility that I have no strength to carry, alone with a freedom I did not ask for and cannot refuse.

I am condemned to be free.

But I am also condemned to be afraid.

Afraid to choose.

Afraid to live.

I am condemned to be tired.

Which is the one they never mention, the tiredness. The existentialists spoke of freedom and anxiety and the weight of choice and the absence of God. They did not speak sufficiently of the tiredness. The specific exhaustion of a person who has understood the condition completely and found that understanding it changes nothing about having to continue inside it.

Léon Spilliaert, Silhouet van de schilder (1907)

…

Mother I have searched for your words.

The ones that found something worth thanking in the steam of morning coffee, in the pale mercy of dawn.

I find the steam. I find the dawn. The words are not there.

Only the doorways. Only the unfinished songs. Only the quiet, unremarkable continuation of a life that does not explain itself and has not been asked to.

-from, The Epistles of Forgiveness

…

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