It is a bright day, but the faces are sullen.
The wind changes direction every so often.
“It’s not the north wind, it’s the south,” they said.
“And what difference does it make?” someone replied.
The city smells of metal, of exhaustion.
Only the trees still know how to age naturally.
And we all think it, deep inside:
at the next dawn, everything will remain the same.
Without embraces to lull us to sleep,
without the courage to dream of an existence apart from dependence on connection.
A friend was walking beside me.
“This wind feels like spring,” she said.
She looked far away, the clouds peeling off the buildings.
“Do you remember? Once, spring came in the middle of winter.
So suddenly that we didn’t have time to believe it.
Will death come the same way, I wonder?”
Some song, somewhere far away,
was playing like a funeral march with electronic chords.
And I thought, how does a person die today?
No one truly ponders it.
And those who do, speak like old romantics
who once read about heroes in faded books.
And yet, death is something that happens.
And perhaps, just perhaps,
one can achieve their own death,
one that belongs to no one else,
their personal way of saying: “I have lived.”
And that game. That is life.
The light fades.
The day closes without decision.
Women carry bags of groceries,
children return home with devices in their hands.
My friend softly sang a broken refrain:
“Spring, summer, enslaved,”
and a couple, just a bit ahead, said:
“I’m tired of the dark.
Let’s go home and turn on the light.”
And I think that was the most human thing that was said.
