You Little Lost Soul

I shouldn’t have changed along with the seasons. Yet, I am getting colder as the winter approaches, as the leaves fall arrhythmically on my shoulders, as the weight of the days gets heavier on my skin.

I shouldn’t have listened to the wind. Good adviser it has been indeed, but only when it blew close to the sea, when my young mind was fluctuating upon the waves. Then it came from North, warned me of my sins, yelled at my tendency to fade away. But it wasn’t right: I needed time, and I ignored my needs. I followed the wind, but I fell like the leaves it was taking with itself.

I shouldn’t have left, yet I did, so intensely and restlessly that I now have no place to call home. I ran as much as I could. The absolute absence of my conscience was in charge of my steps. One day, however, I got close to the great cliff. The tall, white, and scary cliff. Should I let myself experience the shiver of the unknown?

No, I told to myself. The thing I needed the most was equilibrium. So there I was, walking on the edge of the cliff, waiting for time to pass by.

But my words were healing my uncertainty. I heard voices brought by the summer wind, calling me from far away, where home was, where my body used to rest at night. And I turned my back to the cliff, closing my eyes to hear those words once again.

“Come back home, you little lost soul. Come back home.”

And then the world turned white as the words got clearer to my ears. I could feel the sand, my steps leaving their traces on the shore. The crystal water washing over my face, where the river runs colder on my skin, where it mixes with my tears. The grass, the sun, the shivers along my spine. The memories left behind.

I could have left the weight of my body pushing me backwards, where the cliff was avidly waiting on me. I could have. But everything would have been in vain. Not as long as my words still carried meaning with themselves. Who am I to be impartial with my own decision? Impartiality is for the strong ones. I’d rather be a slave of subjective scrutiny if the consequence of impartiality is the destruction of my feelings. Recognising my vulnerability would have been the first step ahead towards a long-awaited reconciliation with my own self. My identity had been erased with time, as the cliff got shaped by the wind pushing the waves against the white rocks. I wrongly pointed the blame for my pain to my insane view of the world, in an effort to find a way out of obsessive thoughts. I left home in order to find myself, when I should have known that a traveller is the most lost among all other individuals. He decides to lose himself for the sake of living adventures while exposing himself to the greatest risks the world has to offer. He leaves his past behind because of the profound hatred he feels towards monotony, while he’s conscious that the journey itself will eventually turn into the most monotonous way of tricking boredom. A traveller is just like an obsessed smoker, who lets his passion slowly pulverising himself with the aim of killing that same boredom that he was escaping from. Yet, he only ends up killing himself instead. And as both a tireless traveller and smoker, I had always been prone to addiction, even if that implied my self-destruction.

Holding a cigarette in my hands, I let the words lead the way as the colours restored my perception of the world. A single path was showing up in front of my eyes, one and one only. And I knew it better than my own palms.

I was going back home. Home.

Home!