What is it that I need? what?
I have been asking myself that for days. Yesterday was heavy, and the day before, and the day before. It feels like one thing ends and another starts before I even get enough time to understand the first one.
And it was
A walk home.
Nothing special, actually. The same road. The same houses. But for some reason I was seeing them a little differently. I see those sculptured balusters on those two-decade-old cylindrical balconies, star-shaped steel grills, yellow lights from the houses, which I’m pretty sure are called homes. Not because they are perfect houses, but because someone is waiting, cooking, talking, or simply living inside them.
Then those neon signs on the food carts by the side of the road, some letters fully lit and some only half. Kids with their carefree nature, some running without anyone watching too closely, some surrounded by extra affection from their neighborhood uncles. The sky filled with black electrical wires. Above them, another sky, slowly getting darker. There is that one star twinkling, then two and three and four…
And I keep walking.
I suddenly notice how much life is happening around me without asking me to take part in it. Nobody knows how my day went. The shop lights do not know, the road does not know, and those children certainly do not know. Yet their ordinary evening makes some space for me. I can just walk through it without explaining myself to anyone.
Maybe this is what a place can do. It cannot solve my problems. The old balcony will still be old tomorrow, the road will probably be dusty again, and those half-lit signs may never get fixed. But they remind me that life is not made only of the difficult things happening inside my head. There are other lives, other little stories, all going on at the same time.
I know tomorrow I’ll again have a hard time. Maybe I will feel like life is almost ending again, for all those reasons. And eventually those reasons won’t feel so big, but then something new will arrive to almost end everything. Almost…
But it won’t.
At least not today. Today I came home. That sounds like such a small thing, but it did not feel small while I was walking. Every single thing was so heavy, yet everything around me was filled with calmness and blessings. Maybe that’s the beauty of life. It does not always become easier, but sometimes the same ordinary road helps us carry it.
And when the time will come, we will go.
Till then I want to live every particle, every droplet and every puff of it, with whatever it’s containing for me.
