Estrangement

on isolation, and existing without belonging

I sit among them. Their voices are bright, happy, convinced. They speak and nod at each other. Everything makes sense to them. I watch, I am an alien. I do not understand, and I do not belong.

I want to leave. I want to go somewhere quiet, somewhere I could exist without their weight pressing against me. But the world offers no corner for me. My place is not somewhere hidden, it is nowhere. I am neither missed nor wanted.

They talk about futures and love, about purpose and plans. I watch. Their certainty is a wall. I do not hold the key to a door I cannot see. I move through their words like a shadow, silent, unnoticed, untethered. They live in agreement, and I do not, and I cannot. Their coherence is a language unintelligible to me.

I see their hands, their gestures, the way they tilt their heads as if each motion confirms they are right. I am wrong, though they do not know me. I do not argue. I cannot. It is not a matter of words. It is not a matter of speech or contradiction. It is something heavier, something they will never touch or see. I am separate. Always separate.

I imagine a place where no one speaks, where no one notices me, and I breathe more freely. But even there I would not belong. The air would hold me, but it would not call me its own.

I feel a weight in my chest, a recognition of what is true, all of them, with their agreements and smiles, are also shadows. Only their shadows are brighter, and I do not envy them.

Bright and happy faces all around me, I see ruin in their eyes. Smiling and convinced faces move through the world like nothing has touched them. In the curve of a mouth, in the flash of a glance, I see their fractures. They speak of joy, of love, of purpose and plans, all the while the ruins of what they are, linger behind their eyelids.

I watch them, and I am aware of the contradiction, and I am aware of the performance of life and the quiet decay it masks. They are both present and absent, alive and hollow, caught in the same absurdity I feel pressing on me. And I walk among them, bright and happy faces… none dare acknowledge this miserable state of living.

The room moves around me. Laughter echoes. A door closes. A hand touches my shoulder. I am not startled. I am not afraid. I am merely aware, a witness. Life continues, and I continue in it, though I am not a part of it… or perhaps I am, and perhaps I was, and maybe that is what frightens me most.

I do not seek approval. I do not seek warmth. I do not seek their world. I exist in the quiet certainty that I am estranged.

And yet I endure, unwillingly, I endure.

I endure, unwillingly…

unwillingly I…

Nothing will change it, and nothing can. Perhaps I will stay here. Perhaps I will move there. Perhaps I will speak. Perhaps I will not. It is irrelevant. The world will continue, and I will continue. The hours will pass, sand will slip through the glass, and the days will come and go, ships in the sea, and I will pass by night, I will continue, and by morning nothing will change, and nothing can.

This is my condition.

…

I have walked endless streets. I have wandered through markets, through silent alleys, through the corridors of strangers’ lives, always moving toward somewhere else, always chasing the promise of some understanding I could never grasp. I have loved, I have argued, I have fought my own brother, I have left others behind, I have been betrayed, I have watched lives bloom and decay around me, and yet I have never found a home for the restlessness inside me.

I cannot turn back, nor do I wish to. I have followed the sources of rivers to their beginnings, traced the paths of streets to the cities they feed, and wandered forests as though they might open into something other than themselves. And where did all of that lead me? I have found that the past is a river that flows only forward, carrying every misstep, every folly, every fleeting joy along with it, all of it has led me here. And every road traced, every shadow crossed, every hand touched, has led me to this moment. To the quiet, unremarkable now where I stand, breathing, and understand that the journey was never about reaching a place, but about enduring the movement itself.

The cities I left behind were never truly behind me, nor the people I encountered ever fully gone. They are carried within me, stitched into the fabric of my steps and my silences. And yet, here I am—alone, still walking, still aware of the absurdity of the road, still alive, still myself, though who I am cannot be untangled from where I have been.

To wake, to rise, to repeat, what cruelty!
Nothing to chase, nothing to hold, only the rhythm of hours sliding past me.

The mornings arrive as if they were determined to break me. My eyes open without asking me, my lungs drag in air against my will, my hands twitch and I am forced into another day.

I lay down, then stand up again. I eat. I swallow. I chew food without hunger. The body demands, the body insists, and I obey because I am nothing without its insistence. I sleep only to wake again. It is not life, not even survival, nothing noble, nothing worth celebrating, nothing worth being proud of, it is a lingering against one‘s own will.

It is a cycle, and the cycle is an iron circle, closing in on itself. I used to imagine life as something open, something that stretched toward possibility, toward discovery. But I think it is only a cage made of hours. I can already see the next morning approaching, before this one has even ended. I am only certain of the next morning arriving. I think the body insists on its cycles even when the mind no longer cares to follow.

And what of me, lodged here between repetition and refusal? I have become a spectator to my own life. I watch the gestures of my hands, the slow turning of my head, the mechanics of existing without desire. I am a shadow on my own skin. I wish to tear this skin away, comfort has long since left me. The cycle mocks me even as it carries me forward, and I do not know whether this is survival or simply the refusal of existence to let go of me.

…

Sometimes I think the trees are better off than I am. They sway without intention, they drink from the soil of what is beneath us without question, and they grow without ever needing a reason. They exist slowly, softly, like a puddle of water that reflects the sky without caring what passes above it, like a red bench forgotten in the corner of a train, holding the weight of strangers without memory. They are not burdened with the need to justify themselves. They do not ache for meaning nor do they curse the lack of it.

They simply are.

And I,

who once thought myself something higher, something more than soil and wood, find myself envying them. To exist without the wound of thought. To endure without dragging along the carcass of yesterday’s questions. To live without the need for life to be anything more than what it is.

I am something cursed with reflection, with memory, cursed with an unbearable awareness of my own absurd persistence. And I circle in my cage of hours, knowing I could never bend low enough to touch their silence. Knowing that even if I sit as still as stone, even if I refuse to move, my mind will not cease gnawing at itself.

All a man needs is… to exist slowly, softly, like these trees. And what of it? The universe does not love me. It does not hate me. It does not know me. I am a moment, a fragile flicker of consciousness between two eternities of black. How strange, that this flicker spends itself in asking for a justification for itself, as if the void could be persuaded into tenderness.

I feel it lodged in my bones, as if absence itself has etched its mark upon me. I may nail my lips closed, I may tear out my tongue, but can I ever rid myself of being? Will I halt my thoughts?
My thoughts rattle, my blood insists on its endless rhythm, my bones mutter with their slow decay. Existence will not be silenced. Existence cannot be silenced, even with the spirit begging for erasure.

Even in refusal, I confess. This aching body betrays, it testifies without consent. My quiet becomes a written monologue, a stage of restraint, and I am condemned to watch as I attempt the impossible. You cannot erase yourself. Even if you bury your voice in the deepest pit, even if you sever the bridge between sound and air, you remain, breathing and trembling. You remain pulsing with the stubborn insistence of life. You simply cannot vanish. Even in suppression, you are louder than the ones who scream.

…

Léon Spilliaert, Solitude, 1901

The hours collect around me.
I pace their narrow corridor,
again and again, rehearsing the same futile arguments
with a world that does not care to hear me.
The trees outside do not care that I envy them.
The sky does not care that I search its emptiness for answers.
The earth beneath my feet does not care that it will one day swallow me.
And I,
fool that I am,
care too much.

This torment… oh what torment!
To know presence is inescapable,
to know existence bleeds through every attempt at erasure.
I can deny you,
you can deny yourself,
but you cannot deny being.

To live a life that has no reason to exist,
and still insist on living it,
that is our fragile immortality.
What a strange punishment to be alive.
And what a stranger miracle to get the chance to live,
softly,
slowly,
like these trees…

-from, The Epistles of Forgiveness

…

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