The sense of the self

In the sense of the self who lingers throughout a stretched life of possible or potential changes, I feel the forgotten need to blossom and rot at times of great self-consciousness, like moss itself; blooming next to moist and damp atmospheres, but rotting at the same time on the surfaces it decides to conquer. Whether blooming or rotting, this need is there, under all layers of suppressed dreams, prominent in the dark, pushing all the other needs deeper into the subconscious tunnels of the brain. What provokes this need to appear – mostly at random moments – are the times of blurred clarity I never managed to pull through. While I sing, I dive into the postcards I had once received and dream endlessly under pink skies, about the nomad life I always thought I was destined for.

The compromise in life speaks to me at times, it sings to me, those songs of experience we sometimes forget they exist. I dive and drown my own self into the emptiness of life, into the vanity of expectations. And since expectations are hard to murder, they keep transforming into nasty birds, ready to inhabit any free and pure thought jumping out of us. Because the me becomes an us, and our minds interwind under the moonlights of our lives, under all those false images projected by the societies we never agreed on growing into.

Deadly thoughts of escapism could be liberating, but sometimes poisonous for the healthy mind, we state we own. Building up a life, under the shadows of architectural monsters – our societies – is not healthy by any form of nature; it is destructive and pointless, it is empty. Empty of the life itself, of emotions and soothing words created under inspiration. The gap between the life we have and the life we dream about should not exist. It should be trivial, small, and insignificant. It should not have a voice or a shape, it should not even be discussed. Because the true nature of things derives from real freedom to act, dream, create and be, not who we want to be, but who we truly are.


Photo: Praktica MTL 5 (1.8/50). Kodak Gold 200, 35mm film. Groningen, the Netherlands. April 2020.