Outside

I wake up when the city is already halfway breathing.

Sunlight slips through the window—not yet hot, but alive, carrying a promise.
I watch the dust motes spin in the air, and each of their slow circles seems to hint that something important might happen today.

I’ve grown used to these mornings.
To the tea that cools faster than I can drink it.
To the silence, stretched taut with a single invisible string.
To short phone calls where no one says anything meaningful, but they still create a faint illusion of connection.

The day heats up—I catch the smell of fresh bread from the bakery,
hear children shouting in the courtyard,
see someone waving from a window, not sure to whom.
The world lives, vibrates, pulses, fills me with energy—
but sometimes it feels like that energy moves right past me.

I eat, but never feel full.
I laugh, but hear myself from far away.

I meet familiar faces—we smile, exchange news,

sometimes recall something important,
and for a moment warmth flares up inside me—
as if things truly were as they once were,
as if I were part of this life again.

Sometimes someone brushes against me—in line, in a crowd, by accident—
and the touch surprises me, seems just slightly too much.
In moments like that I want to turn around and say,
“I’m here.”
But the words remain inside.

In the evening, I wander through the streets—
I look at the windows where faces flicker, shadows pass,
a hand holds a cup,
a silhouette undresses.
Everything is soaked in a sense of reality, of something present,
but somewhere on the edge—
in the narrowest crack between inhale and exhale—
there lives a shadow that cannot be touched.

I try to fill that gap—with talk, with food, with music, even with love—
but it only stretches wider.
Sometimes I feel like I’m about to remember what exactly keeps slipping away,
but something always interferes—
and I return again to my routines:
to morning, to tea, to silence.

Life flows—day after day—
I try to be inside it, to feel, to rejoice,
to hold on to each moment like to a rough edge on a smooth wall,
but sometimes it seems that everything is happening just beside me.

And when another evening dissolves into the rustling of leaves outside my window,
I feel that all of this is happening not with me.
Without me.
Just like the entire world around me.

This is my world.
Life outside the grave.