Sleep requires me to leave my consciousness at the edge of the bed and surrender my thoughts to the hidden treasury of my subconscious, and I cannot cope with all the knowledge buried deep within me revealing itself through dreams.
Sleep asks for surrender.
Every night.
As if there is a knock at my door and I am expected to hand over everything that is inside.
But I do not trust myself.
Sometimes a person does not even trust their own house.
Because I have seen things move after darkness falls.
A thought returning in the morning with a different face.
A memory refusing to die despite the years that have passed over it.
Sleep resembles a graveyard in some ways.
Everyone thinks it is silent.
I hear voices from within.
Everything that can be done for me, I must do myself.
When I first heard that sentence, I thought it was cruel.
Now I think it is simply true.
If what flows within me is really an ocean, then the love of others can only ever be a river feeding my waters.
It may warn me about the storm.
But I am still the one who must live through it.
Today I am a seventy-year-old child.
Some people will call that a contradiction.
I call it life.
Because people do not always grow older.
Sometimes they spend years circling the same event.
The same wound.
The same sentence.
The same night.
The calendar moves forward.
A person can remain exactly where they are.
Today I am the reparation for all of my mistakes.
Not their forgiveness.
Their reparation.
As if life has been following behind me for years, carrying back everything I once broke.
One piece at a time.
Here, it says.
This belongs to you.
This too.
And this.
Yesterday I was a lonely man.
Today I sit alone with loneliness itself.
There are two of us.
We do not like each other.
But neither of us leaves.
When I think about death, the first thing that comes to mind is not the end.
It is certainty.
Because death is the surest thing in the world.
Life is the opposite.
It keeps changing its mind.
Maybe that is why life exhausts people more than death.
Every morning you have to decide again.
Whether to stay.
Whether to believe.
Whether to continue.
And yet there is something inside me.
I do not know its name.
I hesitate to call it hope.
Some words lose their weight when they are used too often.
But there is something.
Something that keeps pushing me toward tomorrow.
Not forward.
Tomorrow.
And for now,
that is enough.
Writing is my way of understanding myself and the world. Through essays and reflections, I explore identity, language, and transformation — the small moments that shape who we are.
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