You are like a prisoner who has voluntarily lost all connection with the outside world. You are like a prisoner who is so afraid of me that you have locked yourself inside a high tower whose roof reaches the sky. For greater security, inside your tower you communicate only with certain people from your family, your ethnicity and your religion. You rarely step outside this circle because you are afraid that you might meet me. And if you met me, it would become very difficult for you to justify the existence of the high tower that you have turned into your own prison. So you communicate only with other prisoners. They are safe for you because generations have built these connections. There are no unexpected emotions there. There you will never meet me. And you are not brave enough to leave your prison and admit that your heart no longer likes it.
I do not belong to your ethnicity, nor do I belong to your official religion. I believe in the majesty of God, but He has no specific name. He is everything visible and invisible. He is all the cosmic energy.
Your prison tower has no postal service to the outside world. That makes you feel safer because you are afraid of my letters.
When I met you, you had already built your tower, and you truly looked like an unhappy prisoner. I decided to help you free yourself by leaving the place that connected us. I left because I knew that if you suffered because of me, it would force you to do something—to change yourself or your conservative way of life.
Instead, you locked yourself even deeper inside your tower, more unhappy than before, and you did not know how to silence the impulses of your heart that insisted on meeting me. But you did nothing for your heart. You continued your monotonous life, doing the same things you had done for years, and the other prisoners in your tower approved of everything. You kept convincing yourself that your heart was unimportant, while what truly mattered was the approval of the other prisoners. But your heart refused to accept that policy.
Then I wrote you my first letter. I decided to be brave and help you because I saw how frightened you were of me. You were afraid that the other prisoners in your tower might discover that your heart was not indifferent to me.
In my first letter, I confessed the secret of my heart. I wrote that you had become special to me for reasons known only to my foolish heart. I told you that if I had been free to choose consciously, I would have chosen a free man to love, not a prisoner, because such a love is condemned to suffer from the very beginning. I wrote to you, and afterwards I regretted revealing the secret of my heart. You answered my first confession with a long and bewildering silence.
You never replied to my first letter. Yet your heart became so deeply stirred by my brave farewell confession that, even to your own surprise, the foundations of your tower began to shake. You did not answer my letter, but neither did you stop thinking about me. Every night, when the other prisoners were asleep, you climbed out of the tower and looked up at the sky, hoping to see my reflection there.
Then I wrote you more letters. You were not accustomed to such open confessions and did not know what to do with them. Just to be safe, you continued pretending that nothing unusual had happened to your heart. But it protested. And it suffered because of me.
Whenever no one was watching, you secretly left your prison and learned how to write your replies to me. You wrote them across the sky. The clouds became your alphabet, and you arranged them into lines that formed sentences, messages meant only for me. Gradually, you became more and more skilled in the art of sending your secret messages through the language of the clouds. At your command, they shaped themselves into beautiful messages that sounded like heavenly music. The clouds did not mind serving as messengers in the secret game of your heart. Whenever your heart was joyful, everyone on Earth could see kind words and longing written across the sky as they travelled swiftly towards me. Whenever you were sad and desperate because you believed you would never see me again, imprisoned as you were inside your inaccessible tower, the clouds gathered your sorrow and your pain and returned them to the earth as rain, refreshing human hearts and giving them hope.
The building materials from which your prison had been constructed were of extraordinary strength. You could not destroy this prison with the help of clouds alone. Whenever your anger against your prison became unbearable, it created violent storms in the sky. The clouds suffered beneath the lightning and the torrential rain that poured down upon the earth. That was the anger of your heart rebelling against your prison. But you had built it slowly, year after year, falling into the trap of your own ideas and prejudices, all designed to make you appear respectable in the eyes of society. The small community inside your prison liked the fact that you had trapped yourself because they enjoyed watching you suffer. That made it easy for them to control you. In fairness, it should be said that some of the stones from which your prison was built had been inherited from your parents, who themselves had inherited them from theirs. The weight of the past, of traditions you had never chosen, of your family environment, and of the conservative expectations of the other prisoners taught you to feel only what belonged inside your prison. Because you wanted the other little prisoners to approve of you. That is how you willingly chose suffering. Year after year, you yourself became one of the stones—a building block, a part of your own prison.
When you met me, you instinctively followed your heart, which recognised me immediately through the universal language of love. At first, you followed its excitement. But every time you returned to your prison, you remembered that I did not belong to your tribe, your religion or your traditions. You suffered because your heart rejected those prejudices. But the stones of your prison were stronger than you.
I stood outside your tower, on the side of freedom, unable to understand what my fault had been that made you avoid me so cautiously and so sadly.
Gradually, I learned to read your messages through the changing moods and shapes of the clouds. Sometimes they invited me to dance a passionate tango beneath the open sky, accompanied only by the clouds. Gradually, you became extraordinarily skilled at sending me your secret messages. And one day, you became so brave that you wrote across the sky:
"I love you!"
I sent you a letter accusing you of playing with my heart because it was so easy to say something so frightening while you remained safely surrounded by the walls of your prison, without looking directly into my eyes. I accused you of a hundred and one sins—of being a coward who loved his chains more than his freedom. You could not understand what I was accusing you of. You believed that I was dangerous because of my strange idea of personal freedom.
And the clouds, those translators of our feelings, kept changing the weather in the sky—from peaceful summer days when our hearts rejoiced to dark storms echoing inside our little hearts.
I stood alone beneath the walls of your prison while you remained inside.
Then one day I saw the clouds write across the sky:
"Save me!"
Perhaps your liberation is only a matter of time.
A matter of change.
Change as quiet as the silent love of the clouds.
(Elena S. Lyubenova)
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