I WILL TAKE EVERYTHING WITH ME

When I leave, I will take everything with me. I will take my soul, my thoughts and my energy. I will leave only my body.

I possess nothing except my soul, my thoughts and my energy. I do not collect treasures that storms and winds will destroy. I do not collect money that would corrupt me. I will take my memories with me. They will keep me warm in the cold of the endless cosmic night.

I have nothing except myself. I do not belong to you. And you do not belong to me. The phrase "You are mine" is an illusion, an expression of weakness, a lack of confidence. Nobody belongs to anyone. No one is another person's slave. We are only briefly and willingly present in someone else's life. Only as guests. We are not masters of others, but guests in their lives.

I was once a small naked dot. The absolute mistress of the starry sky.

Do you remember the spring of the 2,121,284th light year? When we met, our love rose into the heavens like a young star. You, our love and I. We possessed the ability to fly. And we flew freely everywhere. That was enough. Enough for a beginning, a middle and an end. You wanted me to be the mistress of your body. You did not mind my soul possessing yours. Your heart rejoiced because I was its mistress. The same was happening to me. You were the master of my body. My foolish heart forgot its pride because of you. And my soul, born to be free and never to belong to anything material, was ready to sign an act of surrender and proudly declare itself your happy slave.

Happiness is foolish. Moments of happiness dazzle us and make us forget ourselves. When we are happy, we stop searching for meaning because we are already living inside those brief moments of meaning. Then our pride no longer matters. And our dignity willingly becomes a slave, imprisoned by gravity within another person.

So we lived inside meaning. But those around us began giving advice and expressing their opinions. They did not approve of our ideal love because theirs had long ceased to be ideal. They wanted to destroy the spirit of our love because it disturbed them with its freedom and its refusal to obey the laws and conventions of society. They did not want us to remain so free and so happy. And they found a way to destroy our love. We were told that we would be separated from society if we were not like everyone else. We could not simply fly naked and happy like newborn children. We had to get dressed, build a house and fill it with possessions, objects and children. They told us this would bring us lasting and stable happiness.

We wanted to be accepted by everyone else, so we decided to follow their example and gather possessions with which our happiness could live according to the laws of the majority called society. We wanted stable happiness and stable love. Our love did not need possessions, but they insisted that it was important to be like them. We did not want to be different. We wanted to belong. Gradually, we surrounded ourselves with an astonishing number of household objects. You began collecting cars and coins. They made you feel important and secure. I collected domestic comfort. I became devoted to preserving food for the winter in jars that slowly aged because there was far too much of it. We accumulated comfort that money had bought.

Little by little, the objects inside our home became so numerous that they overflowed into our greedy souls, and the house itself became filled to excess with comfort. Yet we never stopped wanting more. The corridors and pathways between the rooms became crowded with new possessions that each of us brought home every day. And so we ended up separated into different parts of our own house. Isolated among our possessions, we lost the path to one another.

We did not fly for very long. With every new object, our ability to fly diminished. We became heavy and enormous. Our stomachs were full of old food preserved in tins and jars. Our clothes were covered with the dust settling upon our comfortable possessions. Our home resembled a tomb where our dreams were stored alphabetically inside cupboards. They sat there waiting for their turn to come. But before that, you had to watch every sports programme, and I had to try every international recipe. Those things filled the enormous silences between us.

Soon you and I, and even our love, had become just like everyone else. Scientists say that human beings are the most intelligent animals on Earth. We were hardly convincing proof of that if we had fallen into such an obvious trap.

But every night I kept dreaming that I was flying. Before falling asleep, I opened the cupboard where my dreams were stored. I took out a few of them and carried them with me into sleep. Then I flew. Free and far away. I was flying, but you were no longer beside me. After every night filled with dreams of flight, I searched for a way to escape from our home overflowing with unnecessary possessions. It was the 2,121,294th light year. The year I began to fly again.

I left. And I left my body as well. No one needed my old body anymore. Together with it, I left behind every scar and every wound I had received during my brief human life. I left the wrinkles on my face. Every one of them had been born from pain. Pain because of you. Pain because of Him. Pain while trying to understand life's traps. I left behind my now barren womb. I would no longer need it in the infinity of the cosmos. Whatever had to be born on Earth had already been born. And whatever had not been born would surely be born in another way. I left behind my barren womb, which gave birth to Him. Then He showed us the path to the eternal life of the spirit and the soul. He showed us meaning. I left behind my barren womb that gave birth to you. You, who taught me both the joy and the pain of love.

Now I am once again a small naked dot beneath the immense sky. I have no clothes. I have no jars of preserved food around me. I have no comfortable old slippers whose soft footsteps announce that I am coming towards you. I possess nothing that could make me anyone's slave.

Now I am only a small naked dot.

The absolute mistress of the starry sky.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)