One single fucking question:
When was the last time you truly lived?
I don’t mean breathed.
I don’t mean ate, slept, worked, fucked, paid a bill, or answered “fine” to someone who had no desire whatsoever to know the truth.
I mean lived.
When was the last time you found yourself inside a moment without thinking about the next one?
Without calculating.
Without preparing.
Without telling yourself:
*first I have to sort this out.*
*First I have to make it to the end of the month.*
*First I have to finish that job.*
*First I have to solve that problem.*
*First I have to reach that fucking point over there.*
And afterward, naturally, you would live.
Afterward.
That wonderful word with which we bury almost everything without having the courage to call it a funeral.
I am not dying.
That is the problem.
I wake up.
I get out of bed.
I make coffee.
I check what I have to do.
I answer whoever needs an answer.
I think about money.
I think about work.
I think about what might go wrong, what has already gone wrong, and what, with a little effort, I might personally fuck up before lunch.
Then I start walking.
Not always with my legs.
Sometimes I walk while sitting in front of a screen.
An email.
A phone call.
A problem solved.
A delivery.
A deadline.
A payment.
Another small fire extinguished with what remains of my nervous system.
I keep moving.
Because someone who moves looks alive.
It is one of the most convincing scams we ever sold ourselves.
If you are busy, you are building something.
If you are tired, it means you tried.
If you endure, then you are strong.
If you keep moving forward, sooner or later you will arrive.
No one specifies where.
The important thing is never to stop long enough to notice that perhaps you did not choose the direction.
In the photograph, a man walks beneath an enormous sun.
He is only a silhouette.
No face.
No expression.
No useless details that might fool us into believing we know him.
He walks along a dark line, his body slightly bent, one step already launching him toward the next.
He could be an explorer.
A pilgrim.
A free man.
One of those photogenic bastards who crosses the desert to “find himself,” then goes home with twelve gigabytes of photographs and the exact same shitty personality.
Or he might simply be someone who no longer knows how to stop.
Looking at him, I did not see a man headed somewhere.
I saw someone who had learned to survive by continuing.
The sun was there.
Immense.
It burned everything.
He could have stopped.
Looked at it.
Felt the heat on his skin.
Closed his eyes beneath the light.
Drunk.
Sat down.
Thought.
Not thought.
But he had already lifted his foot.
He had to take another step.
Then another.
Then one more.
I know that step well.
It is the one you take when you tell yourself:
*I’ll make it through tonight.*
Then night arrives and you have to make it to tomorrow.
You reach tomorrow and have to hold out until the weekend.
You reach the weekend and spend Sunday thinking about Monday.
Then you wait for the end of the month.
Summer.
Vacation.
The next payment.
The next job.
The next woman.
The next opportunity.
The next fucking event capable of justifying all the days you spent waiting for it.
Life becomes a series of gas stations.
You do not truly want to be there.
You stop only long enough to put in enough fuel to reach the next one.
And call the space between them a journey.
I have achieved quite a few things.
Not everything I wanted.
But enough to know the sound a finish line makes when it falls to the ground and you discover it was hollow inside.
It is a small sound.
Almost disappointing.
You expect trumpets.
Fireworks.
A revelation.
Some voice from the sky saying:
“Congratulations, asshole. It was worth it.”
Instead, nothing.
You achieve what you wanted.
You look at it.
For a few hours, perhaps a few days, you feel relieved.
Then the mind clears its throat and presents the next bill.
Good.
Now what?
Now you need a new goal.
Something to chase.
Something to fear.
Something that lets you start running again without having to ask why you failed to be happy when, at last, you had obtained what you believed was missing.
Satisfaction is a difficult bitch.
She makes you believe she will come to your house as soon as you have sorted everything out.
Then, when you ring the bell, you discover she has moved one block farther down.
So you start walking again.
In the next photograph, you cannot even see the whole man.
There are legs.
A pair of jeans.
Two boots.
A hand hanging at his side.
The body has been reduced to its function.
Moving.
You do not need a face to survive.
A face contains too much information.
It might be sad.
It might be pissed off.
It might even look happy and ruin the entire theory.
Legs, on the other hand, do not lie.
They do what they have been ordered to do.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Forward.
That is how I function during certain periods.
I become a set of procedures.
The body gets up.
The mouth drinks coffee.
The hands do the work.
The head produces thoughts no one requested.
The bank account receives money and watches it leave with the speed of a woman who has just discovered my romantic history.
Meanwhile, I continue.
Not necessarily well.
Not necessarily happy.
But I continue.
And in a world obsessed with results, continuing is enough to look all right.
People see you standing and assume you are fine.
It is a very common medical assessment.
He breathes.
He talks.
He makes jokes.
He works.
He goes out sometimes.
Perfect.
The patient is alive.
Too bad being alive and not being dead yet are two very different conditions.
Survival is not always dramatic.
There is not necessarily blood, hunger, war, or wild animals trying to eat your ass.
Sometimes survival has fast internet.
A full refrigerator.
A house.
A car.
A job.
A calendar with every commitment properly marked.
Sometimes you look presentable.
You wash.
You get dressed.
You smile in photographs.
You even make other people laugh.
And yet inside, you are merely managing supplies.
Energy.
Money.
Patience.
Hope.
You calculate how much you can spend without running out completely.
You allow yourself small doses of pleasure, just enough not to tell the whole system to go fuck itself.
A night out.
A trip.
A drink.
A woman.
A road driven too fast with the music loud enough to drown out what you are thinking.
For a few hours, it feels like life.
Perhaps it is.
Then you return.
The door closes.
The noise ends.
And on the table you find all the things you left there.
They were waiting for you.
Problems are very loyal pets.
You can go to the other side of the world.
When you return, they recognize you immediately.
I spent years telling myself I was building freedom.
That all that effort served a purpose.
That one day I would have enough time, enough money, enough peace, and enough answers to finally relax.
One day I would live the way I wanted.
It was an excellent plan.
It had only one flaw.
Life did not appear to have been informed.
It kept happening while I prepared the ideal conditions to begin.
The future is a loan shark.
It promises you everything.
It extends credit.
It tells you that happiness, peace, and freedom can all be yours.
Not today, naturally.
Today you have to work.
Today you have to endure.
Today you must tend to necessities.
But tomorrow will belong entirely to you.
In return, it wants only a small guarantee.
The present.
You hand it over.
One day at a time.
Without reading the fine print.
Then you discover the interest was your entire life.
The third photograph shows a man crossing a pale, arid, almost desiccated expanse.
He is small.
Far away.
There is still space ahead of him.
Just as much behind him.
There is no precise point where the image says: there, you have arrived.
The ground continues.
The horizon continues.
He continues.
It is the exact photograph of how I feel when I achieve something and feel almost nothing.
I look back.
I see the road behind me.
I should be proud.
Perhaps I am.
But pride does not last long when all that fucking space still lies ahead.
Someone might say that is the beauty of it.
The journey.
Growth.
The challenge.
Those are the words used by motivational speakers and people who have already paid off their mortgage.
They say you have to enjoy the journey.
Of course.
Easy to enjoy the journey when you are not checking every five minutes whether you have enough gas to reach the next pump.
The problem is that by always looking ahead, you lose the ability to see where you are.
Every place becomes a passage.
Every person a temporary encounter.
Every success a step.
Every moment a waiting room.
You are always headed somewhere else.
Even when you are still.
Even when someone is talking to you.
Even when a woman is beside you and needs you simply to be there.
You listen.
You nod.
You look at her.
But part of your mind is already solving tomorrow.
It is a sophisticated form of absence.
The body present.
The mind at work.
The heart closed for maintenance.
It is also an excellent way to lose people without ever physically abandoning them.
You need only never truly be there.
For a long time I believed circumstances were the problem.
Money.
The unexpected.
Disappointments.
The wrong people.
Thoughts that arrived at night and sat on the edge of the bed without being invited.
I told myself that once the final complication was removed, I would finally feel peace.
But complications are like the Hydra’s heads.
Cut off one and two appear.
The difference is that at least the Hydra does not email you invoices.
You solve a financial problem and a personal one appears.
You solve the personal one and work decides to kick you in the teeth.
You get work back on its feet and the body begins lodging its first union grievances.
When, through some incredible oversight by the universe, everything seems calm, the mind takes over.
It looks around.
Finds no fires.
Gets bored.
And starts one.
The mind does not always seek happiness.
Above all, it seeks what it knows.
And if you have spent enough time fighting, peace can look suspicious.
Silence becomes an alarm.
An empty day feels wasted.
An hour spent doing nothing produces guilt.
You should be productive.
You should improve.
You should earn.
You should create.
You should solve.
You should become a better version of yourself, because apparently the current one is a defective prototype that does not even deserve a lunch break.
So you invent a new goal.
Not because you truly want it.
Because you need something chasing you.
The struggle gives you structure.
It tells you when to wake up.
Where to go.
What to do.
It saves you from the most dangerous question:
*If I no longer had to survive, would I know how to live?*
I am not sure of the answer.
Surviving is simple.
Not easy.
Simple.
The priority is clear.
You have to get through the day.
You have to find the money.
You have to solve the problem.
You have to arrive.
Living is more complicated.
Living means choosing what you want when no emergency decides for you.
It means taking responsibility for freedom.
It means admitting that perhaps some cages were not built by other people.
You kept them standing.
Out of habit.
Out of fear.
Because at least inside a cage you know where the walls end.
Outside, there is space.
And space can be as frightening as a prison.
I do not want to repeat the usual bullshit about simply slowing down, breathing deeply, and watching a sunset.
Sunsets are beautiful.
But they do not pay the bills.
Serenity does not arrive because you recite three sentences into a mirror.
It is not enough to thank the universe, drink lemon water, and wake at five as advised by those gurus who own twenty-two cars, all parked in someone else’s garage.
There are real responsibilities.
Real necessities.
Periods when you cannot afford to collapse because no one will come gather the pieces for you.
Sometimes you have to survive.
It is all you can do.
And there is nothing shameful about that.
Survival saved me.
It carried me out of days that seemed endless.
It taught me to grit my teeth.
To find a solution.
To continue even when the most reasonable part of me would have preferred to lie on the floor and become furniture.
The problem begins when the emergency ends and you keep living as if everything were still on fire.
When you can no longer tell strength from tension.
When you keep your fists clenched even though no one is trying to hit you.
When you turn every day into something to get through.
Every relationship into something to manage.
Every desire into something to postpone.
Every pause into a mistake to correct.
At the end of the sequence, the man reaches the water.
He is still.
His back to us.
The horizon lies before him.
He has reached the point toward which he seemed to be heading.
Something should happen now.
A revelation.
An answer.
Relief.
The music should rise.
The camera should circle him.
At last, he should smile, understanding that the real treasure was the friends he met along the way, or some other bullshit written to make the audience cry before the credits.
Instead, he remains there.
Motionless.
The sea before him.
The emptiness within.
He has arrived.
And it is not enough.
That photograph frightened me more than the others.
As long as you are walking, you can still tell yourself happiness lies at the end of the road.
But when you arrive and do not find it, the excuses run out.
You can no longer blame the distance.
You cannot say it requires one more small effort.
You are there.
You got what you wanted.
You overcame what you believed impossible.
And yet something is still missing.
Perhaps because we never learned how to receive what we pursue.
We know how to desire.
To labor.
To fight.
To conquer.
But we do not know how to stay.
The moment we achieve something, we begin measuring its limits.
Imagining the larger version.
More beautiful.
Safer.
More profitable.
Happiness cannot even take off her coat before we are asking whether she brought a more attractive friend.
And so we set out again.
Not because the road is calling.
Because arrival makes us uncomfortable.
The man looks at the water.
Perhaps he is thinking.
Perhaps he is thinking nothing at all.
Perhaps he has finally understood there is no place far enough away to let you escape a mind you carry everywhere.
I learned that late.
I changed places.
People.
Projects.
Goals.
I believed the next thing would put everything before it in order.
Instead, I merely moved the disorder into different rooms.
I do not disown the road.
I do not disown the struggle.
I do not even disown the mistakes.
Some were the only things that were ever truly mine.
But I am beginning to suspect life is not what I will find after I sort everything out.
Because everything will never be sorted out.
There will always be an expense.
A fear.
A loss.
A phone call.
A fucking lightbulb that decides to burn out at the worst possible moment.
Waiting for the world to stop creating problems before allowing yourself to live is like waiting for the sea to stand still before entering the water.
You will die dry.
Perhaps living does not mean being happy.
Not always.
Perhaps it means being present even when the moment is not perfect.
Feeling exhaustion without turning it into an identity.
Feeling pleasure without immediately asking how long it will last.
Looking at someone without preparing your reply.
Walking without using every step to reach something.
Allowing yourself a day that produces nothing.
A memory that serves no purpose.
A photograph that does not have to sell, prove, or explain a fucking thing.
Something that exists only because, for one moment, you existed too.
I do not know whether I have learned how.
Probably not.
I am still good at enduring.
At gritting my teeth.
At building another goal when the last one stops keeping me occupied.
I can still turn a possibility into a duty and a passion into a schedule.
I keep saying:
*just this one more thing.*
*Then I’ll stop.*
*Just this one more problem.*
*Then I’ll breathe.*
*Just one last effort.*
Like an alcoholic who has been ordering his final drink for fifteen years.
But at least now I recognize the lie.
When I tell myself I will live afterward, I know I am trying once again to sell the present to the future.
And the future, that old son of a bitch, has never paid cash.
I do not promise to change everything tomorrow.
That would only be another goal.
Another mountain.
Another chance to insult myself when I fail to climb it quickly enough.
Perhaps I need to begin with something smaller.
Standing still.
Now and then.
Not to recover the energy required to start again.
Not to become more productive.
Not to meditate better, work better, or turn myself into yet another optimized version of myself.
Stopping without a purpose.
Looking at the water.
Feeling the wind.
Letting time pass without forcing it to produce something.
And if, in the silence, all the shit I avoided by continuing to walk should arrive, letting it come.
At least it would be real.
At least I would be there.
I do not know what lies beyond the horizon.
Probably another horizon.
That has always been the trick.
We think we have to reach it.
But the horizon is not a destination.
It moves with us.
You can chase it your entire life.
You can wear out shoes, money, love, and years.
It will always remain the same distance away.
Perhaps I do not have to reach it.
Perhaps I only have to stop looking at it as though it owed me something.
I survived.
Many things.
Some people.
Several versions of myself who had terrible ideas and an enviable confidence in putting them into practice.
Survival brought me this far.
I am grateful to it.
Truly.
But I do not want to spend all the time I have left celebrating the fact that I am not dead yet.
I want to know whether something exists beyond the next problem.
Beyond the next goal.
Beyond that sick need to earn every moment of peace.
I want to sit before the sea without wondering what I should do next.
I want to cross a day without treating it as an obstacle.
I want to arrive somewhere and, for once, not immediately look for a new direction.
Perhaps it will not happen today.
Perhaps tomorrow I will start walking again with my head already full of the next point.
But now I know the difference.
Surviving means continuing to move because stopping is frightening.
Living means stopping, looking at where the fuck you are, and having the courage to be there.
I have kept not dying for a long time.
Now, before it truly ends, I would like to try living too.
