Sat to write this morning—or well, afternoon—and could not find the right words—or well, any—and it occurred to me that I ought to write from different places, that sometimes we must induce a slight change, and if an entirely new setting is not possible, then, a familiar cafe at a time you never visit it shall do, and if even that seems outlandish, then we must sit somewhere else in the same room, but I tried the latter and got nothing out of it, only sentences that went nowhere, and all that inevitably led me to the overcrowded cafe I currently sit in—it is Sunday after all; what can you expect?
Finally, I have a table to sit on, which I currently share with two guys who seem to have much to discuss. Enough to let a sole fly manoeuvre around the accidentally aesthetic arrangement of a brownie and cups of coffee they seem to have left unattended.
Sometimes, not as often as I should, I talk to people about how you can feel a sort of soft and perpetual loneliness in life simply because of who you are and what life made you and that the combination of two often can create a living contradiction, and then, they begin to state the obvious and then, nothing goes anywhere. But then, I find myself in a cafe with fifty people and the staff I see at least thrice a week. The golden evening sun stands near the door like an attentive, diligent doorman. All of it makes this seem like something you would want to belong to, and for a little bit, for a tiny sliver of a second, I do not feel as lonely. In this and only this, I stop feeling that thorn in my chest. I do not know any of these people, and that is why I belong because for all these words I waste, maybe I do not know myself.
I feel most myself when I am just one of many, when I am nameless and goalless, and when all my identity can be reduced to a prop in a picture. It is the only belonging I know; besides that, all of my life is a consistent and frivolous struggle to be a person. And now, I have learned the oldest lesson: that in all the fretting over what to bring with us and what to leave behind into a new life, we forget the glaring detail that we will carry ourselves with us.