Just listen, ok?

گهواره‌ی کودک درونتو با این آهنگ تکون می‌دم بلکه خوابت ببره.

You keep trying to make yourself look normal. That's probably where it starts... although you're never quite sure where anything starts anymore. You go places you don't need to be, stay longer than you have to, sit among people just to prove to yourself that you can. You make yourself do ordinary things, as if ordinary things could somehow make you feel like an ordinary person again. You tell yourself you're just getting out for a while. You're just looking around. You're just being alone in public. Nothing strange about that. You go to the bookstore first. You tell yourself it's about the books... which isn't entirely a lie. You walk between the shelves, pick things up, read the backs, turn the pages. You let yourself believe for a little while that maybe this is a way back in. That books might give you something to hold on to, some small connection to the people who wrote them, to the people who read them, to the lives taking place somewhere outside your own. You stand there surrounded by other people's thoughts, hoping that proximity might be enough. It isn't. You can read the words. You can understand them. You can even recognize yourself in some of them. And still, somehow, you're standing there completely untouched by the world you're trying so desperately to reach. You leave. Then you go to the cafe. You don't know why you thought you could do that. In your head it seemed almost easy... you'd sit somewhere, have something to drink, maybe read, maybe watch people for a while. But the moment you get there you know you shouldn't have come. It's not even that anyone is looking at you. They aren't. That's part of it. Everyone is busy being themselves, or whatever it is people do when they seem so effortlessly real. You sit there among them and suddenly your own presence feels absurd. As though being alone wasn't already enough, you had to bring yourself here and sit beside a room full of people pretending they aren't lonely, pretending they aren't performing some version of a life. And you start asking yourself why everything feels so wrong. No. Wrong isn't the word. Unreal. But even that isn't quite it, because what exactly are you supposed to call it when it's not the cafe, not the people, not the books, not the conversations, not the light coming through the window? When there isn't one thing you can separate from the rest and blame for the feeling? It's everything. Somehow it's always everything. The days. Your body inside them. The things you say. The things you don't say. The strange fact that you wake up and continue. You wonder how long you've been standing slightly outside yourself, watching all this happen. Maybe that's why you keep going places you don't need to be. Maybe you're hoping that if you can just look convincing enough, you might eventually become convinced too. You don't. You leave again. You walk back to your car with that small, almost comforting feeling of escape. You can go home now. You can close the door. You can disappear for a while without anyone noticing... and maybe that's the closest thing you have to relief. And that's when you're supposed to see it. You don't feel surprised. That's what gets you. You just look at it and think... yes, of course. As though someone had finally bothered to write down what you already knew, because apparently knowing it privately wasn't enough. Apparently you needed to see it written on a wall too.

آسوده بخواب که فراموش نخواهی شد.

We see your shine More than the dull you fear You're a rare kind If you could see from the outside To be a witness To those deep, deep wounds To resist it To keep that knife from you

جمعه همیشه تسلی ناپذیره...

+++

باید خیلی دنبال کلمات بگردی تا بفهمی هيچ‌چيز توی اين دنيا به اندازه‌ى سكوت دقيق نيست.