I never thought that I would ever be in a place like this.
But here I am, in the land of the vagrant beings, far from the soothing embrace of home, as alive, as real. Lying on my back in the back of the truck, my eyes study the stars like they never have before. Stars that resemble tiny speckles of hope embedded in multidimensional vacuum. Hope that is always there, visible to us, yet too far from the reach of trivial existence. I slowly find myself falling in love with the dark.
The thing about nights: there's only clarity. The clarity that the earth wantonly turns away from, each morning, as it rises from its profound slumber.
A fire is lit. We sit in a circle around it like a troop of soldiers dwelling on an imminent war. I watch the ghostly smoke make its way high up in the air, blurring the picture of the starlit sky. A perfect apparition of ignis fatuus. This is the hour of shared stories, unraveling insecurities, unhealable scars and uncontrolled tears. And soon we turn into a mess of sentiment and tenderness. The kind of mess that makes you feel human, in the most vulnerable and painful way.
After what feels like forever, I feel the touch of that foreign feeling called gratitude. For the first time, in in as long as memories matter, I don't want to be alone. And I'm not alone. We soak ourselves in each other's moments, of despair and of laughter. My heart is not used to this overflowing torrent of empathy. But I let the rivers flow, anyway. Gradually, we all do. Here, where the sky welcomes us with open arms, in the middle of the barren, desolate chaos of the beach, where the wind sits unchecked, we have assumed our home. Home; where we laugh the weirdest laughs and cry till it's ugly. Home, where we can live as ourselves, by our own principles.
And after years, I can finally tell how it feels to have people around me. Not just people but people who have it as worse as me. People who are as scared as I am. People with whom I can dream, infinite bizarre dreams.
I am fine here, I tell myself. And I will be fine as long as I'm here.
YOU ARE READING
We are here now.
Short StoryWe must dream, watch them shatter, fall apart piece by piece, agonizingly slow. We must dream again, before reality becomes a truth we can never wake up from. A parallel and gradually converging story of two different personalities of the same per...
