Читать книгу The boy with the sad eyes - Sam Chevalier - Страница 9

Over time I got used to the loneliness from within, to the point of feeling good sleeping in its silhouette. I have replaced water with coffee, movies with poetry, and I’m here today letting out everything that my soul kept silent for so long. Since I can remember, I have dreamed of having someone in my life, an honest love that would turn darkness into light, melancholy into hugs and empty stares into warm kisses. I have always dreamed of this and everything that comes with knowing that there is someone giving meaning to my existence. Someone that will make me live abundantly, and move away from this emptiness that overwhelms me every day. Every night, there comes a moment when I find myself alone, with my pillow... and I feel that something is missing. I know that soon the gray will go away and color will come into my life. Every morning I wake up thinking about that... I know that it will come, I don’t know when, or how, or where, but it will come, I feel that deep inside my soul.

I have come to the conclusion that loneliness has many faces and that, as life strikes us, we hide in that shell. As if it were a door, we open and close it so that no one enters our small space; I used to do it too.

I was a gale of decisions in the dim light, of hollow words and a heart that was beating without meaning, I even felt that life was collapsing on my shoulders and that I was guilty of everything. Accepting it wasn’t easy, but nothing is, and yet we learn. And so, as people live in the desert, as every survivor, we always manage to adapt to situations, and loneliness is no exception. It is the path to isolation, which is sometimes necessary. Other times we simply don’t know what we want and, so as not to hurt those around us, we prefer to shut ourselves in rather than be where we cannot be.

When one door closes, a thousand open, there are always options, but in some stages of our life we block ourselves. I had a very strong stage in which I felt totally empty, nothing tasted like life, everything was gray, and I was in a dark hole where just thinking about colors was a myth. To me, smiling was sarcasm and a vile lie to myself. This was my life at a time when the problem wasn’t other people, the problem was me.

Many times I would ignore the signs and I reached a point where being sad didn’t feel completely bad. I felt that I had many things to tell, several wounds that I wanted to let bleed and see what words came out of them. That is why I made the decision to write, I spent entire nights, whole days, locked up in my room, pouring out every feeling on paper, by hand. It was like seeing a river in motion, the water constantly flowing. This is how the saddest words arose, the most unusual verses, some beautiful, some heartbreaking, so much so that they hurt when I finished writing them and I read them as if they were all the truths I needed to hear. I was swimming in questions... I didn’t even know who I was, who I wanted to be, who I had to be... I was a child becoming an adult, fearing both the world and myself.

I had dark, suicidal thoughts; there was a time when I hated everything, even myself.

There were people who saw me smiling and talking as if nothing was wrong... it could be said that they thought of me as one more person on the street, without knowing that this was one of my many faces, my attempt to hide my war with myself, and my race trying to get out of that abyss that I had created and from which I didn’t know how to get out.

I never imagined that the solution was within me. I was my own antidote and poison. I had the power to improve, and from that day on I committed to stop secluding. However, that inner loneliness kept haunting me. I spent nights trying to illuminate my dead pieces little by little, smiling as much as possible.

I met people who helped me without even knowing it, I never told them about my emptiness, much less about my loneliness, but with their personalities and their light they helped me a lot. I began to take care of my self-esteem, I changed my way of seeing life, I began to fall in love with myself, to smile again, to go out to the movies at night and to write happy stories, I stopped judging myself so much, and being so hard on myself. It was from those ashes that my words began to emerge; that I understood what it was that fascinated me, what I wanted to do for the rest of my days. I started dreaming big, with fleeting little thoughts sprouting in my mind.

Uncertainty and fear pushed against my ribs, but I kept thinking about those who made it, those who were, are and will be an inspiration to me, like the incredible Benedetti with his heartbreaking verses or Cortázar with his dramatic, unerring tales. Or Green, with his magnificent romances, even Patterson, with his thrilling crime novels. All dreamers, just like me; all conquerors of those dreams.

I started living for myself again. I took the first steps again after learning to love my loneliness, to love my emptiness, the grays and my questions.

I became me again and began to question, to search, to discover myself and see what I was going to become, I never imagined that I could be so ignorant of myself. Before, everything was darkness, today I see the light and I understand that this new loneliness, known from another perspective, has as much beauty as all the chaos in the universe. We aren’t talking about empty loneliness, but about the one that accompanies you, that fills the silences and waits patiently for you to love and rebuild yourself again. Today loneliness is my best company, my constant support, where I feel comfortable and I am able to spread my wings and fly high. It is my corner, where I purge everything, build stories, and where I dream to one day be able to tell my own.

“There are people who will never stop being shadows”.