Editor’s note: These poems trace a journey from the terror of mortality to the difficult, dazzling work of becoming alive again. They move through the fragile body, the shock of surgery, rebellion against old certainties, the seduction of freedom, the hunger for beauty, the ache of desire, and the slow confrontation with death and meaning. Across hospitals, oceans, cities, graves, lovers and memories, the speaker wrestles with fear, refuses easy acceptance, and searches for a truth large enough to hold pain, pleasure, loss and survival.

“Fear cuts deeper than swords.”

             — George R.R. Martin

Next to me was an old man laying on his gurney, and me on mine, powerless, our pride stripped
off, both of us counting on what was our final moments before we left it all to fate. I saw the
deep creases around his mouth carrying a million smiles he shared in his lifetime meet something
that looked like tides on his forehead, and that something was contemplations, worries and
regret all crashing on the shores of the life he had lived, he could have lived, he wanted to live, all
at once. He had no kin next to him, no prayers, no tears. Made me think if he had anyone to return to
or did he even want to in the first place?

I touched my father’s hand, I held it tight, I saw my mother’s face and it hit me.

I feared what if I never get to see them again. This visceral feeling spread like an avalanche and
like every avalanche, the fear (she) was unstoppable, sweeping through everything in her path. I
had no lines around my eyes or my mouth to carry the weight of my smiles or tides on my
forehead carrying any kind of regret or contemplation.

My stomach dropped to my spine and my heart reached my head, begging to stop. To stop this
avalanche. I did not know how to deal with fear, work with fear, for I had never met her. The
gates of destiny opened and the healers strolled me into a limbo between life and death to hear
the final judgement.

When I looked back, she stood there, tall, next to the people who loved me the most and for
whom I wanted to carry those creases a million times over. Between the prayers, the hymns, the
chants, the promises, the last gaze, she stood there with a haunting smile.

I opened my eyes and I did not feel like myself. My inner voice, my inner reason, this echo, this
person inside me. Had left.. There was someone else. It was her.

This new world I woke up to had an unfamiliar rhythm and I had an unfamiliar partner
to navigate the dance floor with.

I believed

Our bodies

Are a speck of the divine

Each cell, a verse

Each thought, a rhyme

This body is a map

Of the places we have been

And the places we'll go

The curves of our bones

Are where the mountains meet

Our hearts are the home of an ocean

Wild and free

our eyes are an imitation of

A galaxy

Would the gods dare to count the stars? Tell me.

And yet I lay powerless

In the hands of mere mortals.

In sterile rooms between

Death and gate.

Weaving through my flesh

Carving through my skin

Opening my little heart

Watching it miss a beat

They slice through the muscle

With their mortal hands

For they want to give this soul

A chance to leap

Now, right here

Was the work

Of the divine

Weaving me back into life

With their cosmic thread

I crossed the gate

But the question remained.

Was I still

a speck

of the divine?

 

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”

             — Vladimir Nabokov

Why endure, why live through all this pain? Life fractures you with illness, betrayal, loss, failure
at some point and it happens when we're least prepared for it. There's a certain rebellion you are
hit with right after. It shows up as anger, for some as grief, for a few as curiosity.

In the beginning it's a twitch under your ribs, you start touching things with your mind. Ideas
they warned you about.. You stop seeking permission to feel. A pulse of discomfort in a room
where everything once made sense.

Suddenly, everything is illuminated and unstable. You notice the artificiality in conversations.
The falseness of the promises you were fed. And beneath all of it, the aching, beautiful fact that
life is not meant to be lived half-asleep.

Awakening isn't comfortable. It burns.

The illusions peel like old skin. Love changes shape. God becomes a question instead of an
answer. Safety feels like a prison. But you keep going, not because you know where you're
headed, but because you can no longer bear the lie of where you've been.

To rebel is to remember that you were once wild.

I vandalised the construct

of my own reality

with ideas I could not hold,

with truths I could not touch.

I shattered the chair

I once crowned with petals,

waiting for voices

to sit and tell me

how to feel.

I smashed the mirror

that never dared reflect

the suffocating darkness

of my virtue.

I tore open doors,

flung wide the windows.

because I was taught

it's noble

to see the best in people.

But to see the best in them

is to kiss the blade

and call it mercy.

And so,

a rebellion bloomed inside me.

Suddenly,

the world I lived in

was no longer mine.

I could not pretend.

I could not promise.

I could not wear the skin

of who I used to be.

I grieved.

Because the loss cut deep.

I grieved.

This rebellion.

it did not free me.

It fell.

It fell heavy on me.

Heavy on my heart.

 

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman... and the first step of the mind is to distinguish what is true from what is false.” — Albert Camus

I met freedom in between swallowed courage, long breaths, unscripted turns, in the heat of
a heartbeat, in coffee shops, at bar tables, in cobbled streets, under a cracked ceiling with a
whirring fan, while holding a cigarette I killed too late, on a woman's nape one night, in the
streets of Naples wrapped in a man's arms.

The finitude of life pressured me to experience everything in a blur. Freedom is terrifying and
real. The price you pay is just simple awareness. I was so afraid of death that I became indifferent
to it, because I could not control it. No sky could speak to me, no promise held me back,
nothing felt forbidden anymore, all the walls turned into mirrors, I felt like a trembling God,
every breath was a birth, a fall never felt too steep, shapes became fleeting colours, I am God,
holy hell. I felt it, I felt it all. My knees refused to kneel, my arms cracked into wings, my eyes,
they stopped searching. They held an unshakeable gaze.

Everything in this world was meaningless to me because I knew death stripped everything away
in the end. So what is really the point? What are we really here to do? Felt like a revolt, a
rebellion of an insatiable soul, there was nothing left to escape but an incredible need to bathe in
beauty, drown in art, defy anything that stood between me and creation.

Only to create a meaning. A meaning to this rebellion.

The waters of Amalfi didn't ripple,

they stunned.

blue like spilled paint on a god's broken palette.

I went in clothed with fear,

and came out soaked in truth.

Salt kissed the corners of my mouth like a prophecy.

No past, no name,

just pulse and horizon.

a wildness that needed no permission.

Freedom is not loud.

It's the silence beneath the waves

where nothing owns you,

And you own nothing

But your voice

Your reason

Your truth.

PARIS

I walked through Paris with wine on my mouth,

and a woman's laugh echoing in between my ears.

In Florence, he painted me in morning light,

his fingers wet with bright colors.

Freedom tasted like figs and sweat,

like bare feet on marble,

like kissing without needing a reason.

I worshipped bodies the way others worship gods.

not out of hunger, but awe.

And no one asked me to choose.

 

When I erased the first word I wrote

I felt freedom.

I thought

Anything I do

Can be erased

Like it was never there

Another word to fill the space

Another dream for me to chase

another lover to muse on

Freedom is for the responsible

But baby I am not

I'm a glass so full

I Spill the water into the wells

Of my palette

I carry it with me

When I hike the Kilimanjaro

I mix it with my drink

I add it to the flour

I Feed it to the trees

I Quench the thirsty

I Nourish the soul

I am meant to give

For I will always remain full

On the darkest nights

The moon will enrage me

Intimidate me

Move me

After all,

I am the glorious home of the ocean.

 

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

                          — J.R.R. Tolkien

Escapism besotted me and I was a slave to its whims. It dragged me to the cobbled streets of
Paris, lifting crimson veils of De Wallen, full of sin, beauty and art, it heaved me to the end of a
knife's cruel kiss. Rome.. I wanted the beauty to swallow me whole, the sins to never forgive my
boundless desire, the art to drown me, to fill my lungs and exile me from life. I could not accept
it.

I befriended Raskolnikov and Meursault. The three of us walked through the streets of Paris,
where revolutions rose, empires fell, we lit our Marlboro with the flame that rose from the
Notre-Dame, what is acceptance? we asked ourselves: it was the death of our characters. This
journey of redemption was nothing but accepting a life that was profoundly unjust and
traumatic. We wanted to be rebels.

My purpose, my rhythm of living was deeply violated by the raging thoughts of death. I knew
falling in its arms was inevitable, the limitation of our bodies, the fragile nature of time. I realised
there was very little of me left and so much to consume.

Raskolnikov, Meursault and I stood there telling one another acceptance is for everyone, except 

us. But deep in our hearts we knew. Truth was greater than any beauty, any sin. It was here 

to conquer us. The question was: did we bring ourselves before it, only to be seen?

Come with me. Let me show you how I discovered the Sisyphus in me.

When did death

Become the answer

To every question asked?

It can't be.

I found myself

In Pere Lachaise

To speak to the dead

A sort of a pilgrimage

through the wooden windings

Under the cherries and the maples

Which stood tall and wide

Guarding secrets

Centuries since.

All souls buried under the same land

Does the saint share his flowers

With the murderer?

I wanted to ask

I wanted to know

Is life really absurd?

Meaningless?

Like Camus said.

If this is all it is

The city is indifferent to

Life and death

And everything in between

Why build tombs?

The stillness of death

The aesthetics of it all

Beauty is suffering after all

Suffering from the impermanence of it.

Clinking glasses

Soft laughter

Paris makes everyone

A thief

For everyone

Is trying to steal her heart.

In all your glamour

And decadence

Why did you still remind me of

A true philosophical problem

Called death?