Departure without disappearance

 

“Everything happened in one night.”

People keep saying this because, according to them, everything was fine beforehand, and then, merely as a result of a reactive response, everything fell apart. Yet nothing happens in one night; all explosions occur as a result of some kind of accumulation. But since this way of thinking comes from the same narrow minds that believe suicide will result in the torment of hell, trying to explain this to them is futile.

Did you ever actually ask him how he was? Not the kind of “how are you?” you ask just to greet someone you see, for which the answer is already expected to be “fine,” but a real “how are you?” I already know the answer to this question; I just want to remind you. He was a recluse, even in the middle of a crowd, and you were not sharing any common language with him anyway, so you were not even qualified to ask that of him.

I rarely saw him in the streets because he did not wander there. But I often encountered him on the forested hills outside the town and on the cliffs overlooking the sea, and this led me to think that this was not a coincidence.

I had deep conversations with him. Most of them were dominated by long silences, and these silences were tolerable because we both knew their meanings; anyone else would have been merely uncomfortable. He was like me, after all. What was he supposed to do in the town, in those cramped houses, amid noise from morning till night? People were not reality for him; quite the opposite: he was fleeing from people toward reality. The more solitary he became, the closer he got to himself, and the closer he got to himself, the more solitary he became.

I saw him for the last time outside, exactly one day before his death. He was at the cemetery on the hill, in that desolate place where no one goes. It was one of those exceptional places where our separate worlds intersected, and there I saw him standing silently by a grave, looking at the name carved into the stone. Did he have a deceased relative? I do not know. But it seems to me that the person he was connected to had no social relevance to him, yet held a deep emotional bond, and this bond was one he had developed himself.

I was frightened when I saw him because he was just standing there, neither speaking nor moving a single part of his body. He was just looking, as if in a trance. What was in that gaze? Sadness? Too cheap. Grief? Too casual. There was a deep respect in him, or at least that is how I sensed it. A cold reverence felt toward the dead and toward the death that killed them.

I do not think he despised life. He was merely a fog drifting from place to place; like me, he was too detached from life to despise it, because he already lived his life entirely within himself. I do not think he glorified death either, because he was not someone who found death “preferable.” There was only a pure, unadulterated alienation in him, and this alienation inevitably caused him to feel a sympathy toward that opposite pole which is foreign to life, namely death. Not love. Not awe. Just recognition.

That night, I finally followed him to his home silently, without making him notice, because he was the first person in years who had genuinely caught my interest. That is how I learned where he lived. It was not a secluded place. It was not even a desolate place. He lived right in the middle of this town as an alien, and perhaps that was precisely why he was one. The next day, after spending long hours in my room writing in seclusion, I decided to go out for a walk at night, when the surroundings were deserted, as it was my primary activity outside.

I went to the cemetery again, thinking I might encounter him, but he was not there. So I changed my route and went to the distant cliffside. I passed the narrow road that runs right beside the forest and reached the seashore.

As soon as I arrived, a cool breeze began to strike my face, and thus both my lungs and my soul were relieved. I looked at the abandoned decades-old watchtower at the very edge of the cliff and saw how surreal it was, and it could not have been more real than that. But when I looked once more at the top of the tower, I saw him there, on the square-shaped balcony surrounding the structure. He was there. What was he doing here? Asking that was, of course, meaningless, because frankly neither of us was doing anything, and all the beauty was precisely there.

I sensed a stillness in his movements. A disturbing stillness. Not a stillness born of peace, but one that comes from the conclusion of a war. He always carried this within him, but this time it was more visible than ever, and I could not ignore it.

He was holding onto the railings and leaned back and forward a few times, as if testing something. Because the tower was surrounded on all sides by a steep slope descending into the sea, I sensed that this was a rehearsal. He was preparing to leave. Yet he had never really arrived in the first place; to leave, one must have come. He was not going to disappear; he would depart, and perhaps he would settle where he departed to.

This sight disturbed me involuntarily, because I was perhaps witnessing the final moments of an entire universe, and this universe was still not letting out a single sound. I thought maybe he was just looking at the sea, and I began to watch him, standing still. He, too, was standing still. There was no haste in his actions. For him, either everything had already ended, or nothing had ever begun, and it was this unbegun state that was about to end.

At that moment, he swept his gaze around, as if he would miss these places, yet would not suffer from their absence, as if he were now complete. First, he looked at the gray sky covered with clouds, with a particular reverence. He lowered his head and looked at the endless sea before him, with a longing for something that was never lost because it was never gained. He turned to the other side and looked at the trees slowly, as if examining each leaf one by one. And then he looked toward the path leading to the tower. And there he saw me. When he saw me, he did nothing. He was just standing there. Only looking. But this was not an empty look. Everything was in that gaze.

I could not see his eyes from where I was, but I no longer needed to see them, because he had conveyed everything to me. He knew what it meant for me to be there: I was there, and if he wanted, he could come to me. I already knew he would not. I wanted to show my respect by not rushing. I, too, simply looked at him from afar and conveyed everything passing through me with my gaze. Not a single word came from either of our mouths.

After this deep exchange of looks lasted for about a minute, he lifted himself and placed one foot on one of the railings. I did not oppose him, because nothing had ever been done to him except opposition, and this act of annihilation he was performing would be the very thing that would make him exist. Then he placed his other foot on the railing and balanced himself there, supporting himself with one arm against the wall behind him. At that moment, he turned and looked at me one last time. I did nothing. And by doing nothing, I had done everything, and he already knew this.

When I closed my eyes for a few seconds, he was no longer there. I had heard no sound. The sound of the wind and the waves was already drowning everything out. Was it that easy to depart? Then why did not everyone do it? Because they were not migrants. They were residents of this hell. This was their home. The home of the homeless was only homelessness itself, and thus he had returned home.

After his absence, I continued standing there. I did not take a single step toward the tower, because I already knew what I would see. On the contrary, I turned back with even deeper contemplation and decided to enter his home. When I entered the town and arrived in front of the place where he lived, since I no longer cared, I managed to enter without injury by throwing a stone and breaking a window. Because there was no one around, no one interfered. Everyone was in their sweet sleep, unaware of all that had happened, and not even the sound of the breaking glass could wake them, because whether awake or not, they were always asleep.

When I entered his home, I was surprised. Not because it was different from what I expected, but because it was exactly as I expected: scribbled papers, thick notebooks, and a massive bookshelf holding perhaps a thousand books, maybe even more than the town library itself. Where had he brought these books from? Not from the town, of course. From outside. He was not living here anyway. Only his body was here. His soul was always free, and therefore it had never been embodied.

I ran my fingers over the books for a while. Most were philosophical, and not the kind that certify, but the kind that marginalize, dangerous philosophy. I saw many names there. I knew most of them. He had read these aggressive thinkers I had read; I had sensed this since the first time I saw him, because he had become a reflection of the library in his mind. Many of the books were filled with chaotic scribbles and strange drawings that looked as if they were drawn out of overload rather than boredom. He seemed to care about content, not aesthetics; you know those obsessive people who go mad even at the wrinkling of a book’s pages. He was not like that. I do not think he would have been upset if the bookshelf disappeared, because he had already carried the entire library within himself and therefore could never lose it.

When I opened the notebooks and skimmed through the pages one by one, I saw that he had recorded his years day by day. And one thing immediately caught my attention: even though the way the theme was handled changed over the years, it was always the same theme. The crisis of a free mind enslaved among slave minds. I know how seeing everything means being able to show nothing, and he had now shown me this inability to show.

I did not go through the notebooks any further. What kind of person he was had already settled deep in my mind. But I could not leave the writings there. By morning, they would present them as evidence, saying, “This is why it happened.” I could not allow such trampling of an inner world. So I took all the notebooks containing those precious feelings and thoughts. Or I stole them, I do not know, but frankly, even if not physically, they would have been burned spiritually by society anyway. So I took them to my own home and placed them in my own bookshelf, never to be found or discovered again, because the realities inside them were too sacred to be scattered around.

A few days later, the police drew yellow tape in front of the house because they had found the body, wedged among the rocks along the shore. Society was once again turning his cathedral into a barn. I cannot even imagine how many hundreds of times he must have lived through this.

When the police questioned me as well, I was uneasy because of the broken window and assumed I would be treated as suspicious, but then I realized there would be nothing to trace back to me, as I had a long-standing habit of wearing gloves, partly because of the cool climate, partly because I preferred keeping my skin covered. Whatever marks might have mattered were never mine to begin with, and that was why I was never identified.

I told them nothing. They did not insist, because they already thought it was impossible for me to have had a relationship with him, since I, too, was a holy bat spending the entire day in my private cathedral away from sunlight. So they left, thinking I could not have known him. What they did not know was that only I knew him, that I knew him enough to know that no one ever could know him.

During this period, I wrote these texts to pour out what was inside me. If I were to depart from this world as well, they would invade my home in the same way and scatter these writings as if they were heresy, because according to them I committed a crime by not saving someone who could have been saved. Society will not understand that he was already saved. Excessively saved, and that was precisely why he was lost. He was a sublime being, stripped of all those primitive needs that bind other people to momentary pleasures, emotional games, religious fanaticism, or political parties. The world is far too dull for such sublimity, and beyond dullness, it is a place that actively tries to erode it.

Am I even alive? I do not know. I only know that if I choose to wake up from this dream, I now know what will happen. Perhaps you will not even understand what I mean. That is fine. A person who has never tasted being understood comes to feel disgust toward being understood, and I would feel that disgust if you did understand. I wrote not because I expected you to understand, but because I expected you not to.

What will you do with this text now? I am speaking of a life whose existence you have only just become aware of. And even this speaking remains limited to writing, whereas language cannot express it anyway. Moreover, he is now absolutely no longer in this world. And I was never in this world either, because I always existed in my own world. When the inside fills up, the outside empties. When the outside fills up, the inside empties. You can see this everywhere. And perhaps then you can understand that this letter did not actually come from anyone, that there is not even a letter at all.

Atrona.