LEAKING INTO DAYLIGHT

I used to spend my time running past the same houses, blasting songs loud enough to drown my thoughts, writing down every one I couldn’t escape. I’d live by my own time, letting the trees guide me wherever they pleased — no place to be, no one to meet, no need to detour around all my mind had to offer. I believed in greater forces, I chased guidance in smaller things. 

I wished to live inside my head and in my ways, I did. I was younger then, maybe even wiser. I felt everything to the bone and noticed more than I do now. But I also carried heavier pain, had less control of myself. What played in my mind often leaked into the world around me. I don't refer to simpler things such as thoughts, ideas and plans. I refer to the confusing, the amusing, the accusing. All I hoped for and couldn't escape. These weren’t fantasies — they were beings. They surrounded, penetrated, contaminated. The more I spoke to myself, the less I understood. I built scenes, rewound them, layered them over sidewalks, ceilings, the faces of strangers.

I was restless, really. Though all I did was dream. But those dreams weren’t passive. They demanded. They stitched themselves into my senses, rearranged the way I believed my life was. My mind didn’t just wander; it constructed. I spent years chasing nothing, and calling it everything.

Now, I silence the parts of me that once made me who I am. I’ve learned, as people do, to keep my feet on the ground. I no longer rewrite reality as I walk through it. I don't let things leak.

I do miss the current, how close everything once felt. How personal the world was to me. The way it all demanded to be translated into sound, into sentence. Though I don’t regret having taught myself to sit still when I need to. I breathe. I listen. I try not to notice it, not to name it. To let the light drown me out. 

But when it does happen, it is beautifully and scarily inevitable. What leaks is a million versions of who I am, who I was and who, eventually, I will once be again. Scattered through time, gathering in the dark, leaking into daylight. What’s meant to surface will find its way.

Autoria: Nina Neves

Revisão: Artur Santilli

Foto de capa: Pinterest