The interior of a shattered vase has made more room for light.
There must be a space between things for possibilities to arise,
and so pain calls forth a space for healing. We are allowed to transform.
That growth is painful is no revelation, perhaps that’s why some days feel so unbearably dark. Those shadows, they’re simply waiting for love’s light.
I was fifteen when I began walking to the kiosk by the train station,
buying the already expensive magazines, Vogue, Studio Voice, Rolling Stone or NME. It wasn’t always the models or the rockstars that pulled me in.
It was the covers, they sent me into a kind of trance. The skyline of New York made me dream, the ripped jeans of people wandering through vast cities,
their clothes a symbol of freedom, of becoming who one chooses to be.
Between the skyscrapers and the Central Park paths, I imagined myself walking, entirely occupied with being, surrounded by just enough space for the mind to breathe. The cooing of pigeons echoed like buried dreams. The red of the sunset became an expired ticket to a jazz concert with Rubinstein, Heifetz, and Feuermann. And while the Million Dollar Trio struck a match on the side of a piano in some quiet lounge of Carnegie Hall, it tore something open in my chest,
as if I were living a past life in the 20th century, somewhere in the 92nd Street Y.
Because I felt it, like I was there. And yet it was untouchable. I think of the metaphor with the hand: When you spread your palm wide and try to bite the center, you cannot. Even though it’s right there in front of you.
I close my magazine and drift from my winter garden, a room with three large windows. It resembles the space from the cartoon Hey Arnold!..
he’d lie beneath those big windows, arms behind his head, searching for his self in the starry sky above New York.
Just like me. Only I dreamed myself to another place, beneath another sky,
into the great wide world.
I grew up in the 90s. My mother was sixteen, my father seventeen when I was born. My mother fought for me.
“I wore oversized clothes and locked myself in my room at night,” she once told me. I’d stroke my belly and say, We’re going to make it. Everything will be okay.”
Now here I sit, writing these lines. I am deeply grateful to my mother, i don’t think I could have done what she did at sixteen.
I was raised inside a triangle. I lived with my paternal grandmother, in a large house with two gardens. My father lived there, too, until he began traveling to Thailand, and eventually never came back. My parents split when I was four.
Weekends belonged to my mother.
I learned early on to live between doorframes, never fully here, never fully there.
And maybe that is my home: the in-between.
In those young years, i grew roots inward. My parents’ families couldn’t have been more different. There was a strong wind at Grandma’s, and yet I remember the evenings when she read to me. The scent of freshly washed laundry drifting in from the garden, and how she and Grandpa showered me with material things.
That’s why the idea of losing her became an existential threat, ot only out of love,
but because she was etched into my nervous system like a piece of my identity.
From my mother, I drew love. She tried to show it through letters and words,
even though I mostly lived with Grandma. Eventually, I taught myself to fight for every drop of affection. I kept wondering:
What is love, anyway? Everyone seems to speak it in a different dialect.
For a long time, I understood nothing.
Talking about emotions and inner worlds wasn’t exactly fashionable, at least not in my life. We had everything, and yet we lacked the essential:
Recognition. Connection. Expression.
For a while, I truly believed my feelings were invisible.
As a grandchild I lived inside the family, but always alongside it.
I grew into a role instead of maturing into an identity. I became a bud that didn’t know how to bloom. I sought myself in the distance, in the wide-open world,
because I could not feel myself within.
And with every vision, every daydream, light poured through the cracks.
In solitude, an infinite expanse opened up, which I decorated with things that lifted me. And into that quiet space, a letter by Flaubert drifted toward me, in which he wrote that the heart moves not through experience, but through imagination, and that humanity lives by illusion, and without it, would perish.
Then imagination stands eye to eye with reality, perhaps even more real, because it dwells in every cell of our intimacy. The ego wants to always be inside something, erhaps because it doesn’t understand depth, or perhaps because it throws us into another kind of depth altogether. But our visions reveal so much about who we are. Scenes plant themselves within us, casting anchors toward our hearts.
Where do we belong? Sometimes we must orbit a while before we find the ground where we wish to drop our fruit, because something ancient within us knows: Here, I may rest.
These places become symbols for us. For me, it was the London Stadium.
Again and again, scenes appeared before my inner eye.
I could feel what it would be like to be there.
A game of heaven. A baseball player swings the wooden bat, everyone’s eyes follow the white ball with its perfect red stitches. The runner kicks up dust in the sunlight.
I devour my second hot dog. Here, i no longer need to understand, it is enough to be. Everything is primitive and dignified.
After the game, i open the passenger door of my Caddy for a beautiful woman
and drive her home. Imagination is half of life. I changed jobs the way one changes book genres. I was curious about many things, and once the curiosity faded, i moved on.
Because with every adaptation, a quiet alienation gnawed at me.
I felt myself slipping away just to survive in a world like this.
Camus’ words come to mind:
“What does it mean to live a life that was never quite your own,
yet remains the only one you’ve been given?”
But one theme never left me: the form of expression. I began submitting a series of fictional short stories to small magazines, and they published them.
On those evenings that cast our faces in a warm orange light, we met up to toss a few baseballs into a worn glove, no words, just the rhythm of leather and dusk. Whilst feeling the ball in my hand, i remember Bataille, that we touch the infinite only through wounds.
The Nike Air Force 1 had just hit the market and The Beatles blasted through our headphones. The Knicks lost again, missed the playoffs and Sprewell left. With him went the last bit of rebellion. In that long dusk hour, the vision surged over my tongue:
“I will write for the great magazines in the metropolises.”
They laughed. In the weeks that followed, their parents laughed too.
Shame crept into the fine hairs on the back of my neck. My spirit sank into a dense shadow. Out there, in the field of reality, i met a girl and wrote her poems she never received.
My mother found them, crumpled in my wastebasket as she cleaned my room.
That was my coming out. Where imagination had once been an escape, it now became a return, to myself.
I needed those places. They formed my identity. They were calling me, all along.
Kafka once said: “I am a cage in search of a bird“
We arrive in order to endure. We leave to preserve ourselves.
But imagination? Imagination waters the core of who we are. Between seasons, I kept dreaming myself into the next great city.
I feel the endless expanse of Hyde Park. I breathe in its strength, deep into my consciousness.
From the Royal Albert Hall, a long-faded applause echoes inside me. I can smell the warm, sour trace of lipstick. i breathe in once more, searching. But it’s gone.
In Chelston, autumn steam curls through the air like a whip of perfume, setting a new carousel into motion.
In the middle of Waterloo. Late afternoon. The rain is indulging itself, guttering through the city’s skin, steam unfurling in soft white spirals from the manhole covers.
Old beliefs drift upward with it, quietly sent on a mission. The streetlights glow with a yellow tint. Here and there, rolled-up scraps of the Times rest in the gutters, as if the stories within were curling up in the asphalt’s corners, trying to keep warm for one last night before they’re forgotten, before they burn.
Time burned. But what is the spiritual within the human being ? That which, touched by the Spirit of God, catches fire and burns without end.
Twenty years later… on that one morning… I stepped off a train called Elizabeth, in Paddington. Directly into my former vision. I felt dizzy. Into the world that saved me. I felt home. A mirror that, for the first time, did not distort me but recognized me. A rare liberation embraced me; for a heart programmed for vigilance for so many years, this encounter was intoxicating. A place that allows me to choose.
There, I love myself as I am, not because everything is perfect, but because I come closer to myself there. An emotional attachment theme now reveals the true chains I was unable to see or recognize. Until now, these emotional effects had only existed in the shadows. The great real world, which grants me an entirely new emotional ground, brought light into this. I now comprehend Kierkegaard´s questioning: „When have I found an attitude that sustains me?“ All the images emerge before my eyes and shoot to the water’s surface, it becomes lighter around me.
And with this movement, my senses turn like wound-up film reels, whose projection has now become reality. How aware are we of the consciousness we are moving through? Since the day i arrived in the city, an inner shift began. After three years, this transformation freed a deep realignment within me and led me to a career unbound by place. It was one of the most demanding yet formative and exquisite experiences i have been granted. Today, it rests as my second home, the quiet harbor of my inner peace. I built a city on the edge of my cracks, on the shore of my longings, my hope fills it like a river reflecting the dawn towards me.
Today, I sit at the edge of my dreams and dangle my feet, pull out a book, and open it in London. We cannot run away from our broken hearts, but we can learn to balance on their calluses.
Love Letters from Paddington 