Perhaps, in the end, death isn’t silence, but the fact that the streets continue to exist without you walking down them. Today, the room was filled with your absence… and your presence was so tangible that I can almost hear you breathing next to me on the couch.
That’s how people are; they head out one afternoon to buy cigarettes and forget to come back from eternity. And we’re left here, with our hands tucked into the pockets of old jackets, feeling around for holes and tickets that have long since been canceled. I look in the mirror and don’t recognize myself—I see only the void you left behind, the outline of a person missing from the middle of the room, from the middle of my life.
The days go by like slow-moving trucks on a highway that leads nowhere. Our relationships, our friends, our loves… everything now resembles those abandoned houses in the countryside, whose windows gaze into the void with an inexplicable sadness. How can you talk about «tomorrow» when your «yesterday» bears the name of a person who has become a memory?;
Dionysis, if you could see our city now, you would see shadow-like people passing one another by, each carrying their own dead as if it were a secret medal. Our humanity has become a tear we’re afraid to shed, lest our vulnerability be exposed. And yet, somewhere out there, between a broken streetlight and a stranger’s chance smile, I feel you touching me.
Because a sob is not defeat. It is our last act of resistance against indifference. And if my heart today wears armor made of emptiness, it is solely to keep your laughter intact within it.
We’ll meet again, Dionysis. In a dream, at some bend in the road, where time stops chasing us and people become once again what they’ve always dreamed of: light. Until then, your silence will be my most powerful song.
Why, my friend, don't people die when we bury them,
They die when we forget them on the side of a road that leads nowhere.
So pain is the only way I can keep you alive.
Don't turn off the light, Nionio….
