Those who win by losing

You woke up before the alarm clock today as well. You hurry to turn it off before its sound penetrates the overtone of last night’s words. In the dark, thoughts, their expression, what they do inside you, gο a little deeper, get a little more intense, a little purer than the day.

And yet the dawn has come.

You get up to open the window and let the daylight pour into the room. It is the chilly season and the weather has become colder and the time thinner, concentrating and squeezing the days between dark and dawn. That is why the light seems to differ and each body has another shadow. This is when the world inside you confirms its incompatibility with the outside world. You feel their every parallel line, every weight of every shadow, every tension of the light permeate your body. You can almost hear the crack of your bones, you sense the chill piercing your spine, your feet hating the cold floor and your eyes ache even as you draw the curtains.

Admit it.
You didn’t want a new day to come.
Neither today nor yesterday.

You have memorised all the cliches; about the new opportunities every new dawn brings, about falling seven times and getting up eight, the ones about patience and optimism – which must be around here somewhere. Your brain has started working overtime again repeating them over and over. That’s the way days like this one have gone by; mechanically, almost like a robot in your own clothes, executing life’s practicality -that none of us can avoid- while all you wanted was to stay under the old blanket of your single bed, forever.

Just like that time passes through you, profound like an abyss of thousand nights. You close the door and you get out, taking a quick look at the house. It seems different in the daylight, now that no one is wearing it out to find the meaning behind it. It is only then, during the night, before you fall asleep, that you mark your labor time.

Labor without progress, though.

You close the door, and you burst out in the streets, to the outside world. Among the lines the cars draft on the road, the voices of passers-by, among the choruses of the traffic lights, between your eyes in the car mirror. And you are still looking for it. Job, money, properties, a social life, a family life – all fixed.

And yet, your void gapes.

You notice the looks, the moves, the aura (if they have one) of the people you talk to, say hi to, discuss things with, make dates with, arrange meetings with – and you realise that inside every person you know there is another person you do not know.

And you want to go out and celebrate with the ones who are not brilliant. Those who question the very purpose of their existence like you do. The ones who feel they do not belong, those ones who feel they were born in the wrong century, in the wrong galaxy. With those who feel paranoia close by, facing inventions of our time -like career, status, bank accounts- and feel trapped in their own flesh.

You want to celebrate with those people like you and me, who are equally messed up, complex and bruised. Those who spend their Sunday afternoons gazing up at the blue skies, trying to find the truth within them, looking for something to save them, to free them, expecting miracles while sipping coffee. Those who are too lost wandering through forests and alleys, around corners and countries, hoping to make sense of their entity.

Hoping to be significant. Wait. Not to it; not to this love who perished them in its world, and took them so deep to the bottom of the tube that no matter how their lungs cried out no one could hear them. No. Not to it.

Significant. Period.

You want to celebrate with those who are trying desperately to love themselves with the self-love they are told is healing but that they fail to reach every time. With those whose body and soul feel like two separate beings and have been exiled from the home within their own heart. Get out with them scream, laugh out loud. Light fires in the city and rebuild it with the ashes. But this goes in vain.  Reality has crashed into us, knocked us down, has made us dogs who stare at an empty, blank space, poorly fed and strays, and has given us rechargeable batteries to turn on the switch in our brains and wake up quickly from our world, before we rest there too long and never come back.

But, look. Look closer, deeper in the mirror.
You survived. We survived. We made it.

Survival looks good on us.

We assemble it from our world that each night melts away among our house walls trying to find the meaning and each morning gets us out of bed. Even in a blue mood, even reluctantly. After all, had we not created our world, we would certainly have died in other people’s. The dark marks under our eyes are highlighted when we laugh. The lines on the horizon and the power in the sky still engulf our imagination. The big, dark clouds are simply another chance to dance in the rain and tell the others – yes to those who call us weird, strange, daydreamers – of that invisible thing that’s behind the rain. The one always visible to us. The rainbow.

We are done trying to figure out who is with us or against us, or who walks down the middle because they do not have the guts to pick a side.

We are done with everything that ruins the peace in our world. We realised that the opinions that are of value to us are of those who dared to love us unconditionally, for the things we shared – or not. Those who were always there and on our common path, who always stood by us because it was just us; without any other reason needed. We know that faith is a lifestyle and validation is for parking and thus we build our kingdom invulnerable to the external forces, not because of a job, or a love, or a whim, but because life is too short to leave our happiness in someone else’s pocket.

Instead, we filled ours with glitter, pixie dust and strength, folding it into a piece of paper, to fit our own pocket, and we moved on. We became this “something else” we wanted to embrace, strategically avoiding all our restrictions. We became trustworthy, because we lived and died a few times before we could be entrusted. We ripped our hearts out and lost everything – and we proposed toasts drinking to that. We have been thanked for surviving and we repaid the gratitude by sharing our success secret – which has been always the same:

When you’ve lost it all, get back in the game.