Before Knowing You I Was Unconscious
Context:
Edinburgh will always be a foundational life chapter in my personal history. In fact, it feels more like my hometown, than the town where I was born.
But, inevitably, every chapter eventually comes to an end, and at some point I felt a need to leave. My life was great, I loved the city and I had wonderful friends, but deep down I knew that if I stay for a bit longer I will get stuck here forever. It didn’t feel like necessarily “bad thing”, but my soul needed to grow, and the growth I was looking for involved leaving this magical city which will always be so dear to me.
I’ve said this letter out loud (and recorded it) two days before my departure, sitting on my favourite rock, not too far from where I took the photo below.
🌀
Before knowing you I was unconscious.
Yet this is one of the last times that I am taking a look at you.
It feels strange. In two more days I will be on the other side of this beautiful continent, in a completely different space and time, with completely different people whom I haven’t seen for a long time. Will I ever see you again?
Goodbyes are what we pay with for the freedom of traveling. There are plenty, and none is easy to say. How could they be? If I am leaving something that I love with all my heart how can I simply say:
See you later!
Will I ever?
See you at some point… Maybe? We’ll see…
It’s not that I don’t want to see you again, but I know that everything changes and is never the same again. I don’t know what will happen when I will be away. To both of us.
I get used to what is, but then something else grabs my attention and I look away for a moment. As I look back–what was is now gone. Circumstances change and it’s only me on my own again.
It’s good to be on my own. We all need time to process everything what happens and there is always so much life around. Just look up. We don’t look up often enough.
Goodbyes are never easy and you’ve been a wonderful company for the past seven years. Enough to feel you are my home. It’s with you that I became who I am now.
Before knowing you I was unconscious.
Before knowing you, I was conscious only of self-consciousness, as a teenage boy falling in love with beautiful girls who weren’t falling back in love with me–which I couldn’t understand, because I would give them all of myself.
Love is a hard process to learn. It rips our hearts, as we fall in love with people, places, things, parts of our skin and memories–which all inevitably change.
Everything is temporary and here I am about to leave you.
I’m moving to another chapter of life to discover who I am, what the world is and what there is in this world.
I’m going to discover geographical locations and people who live there and how they live and how they build connections between themselves. I’ll observe and learn how I can help and appreciate the differences between us.
I am genuinely interested in people and the world, because it is all so curious to me. How could you not be interested in the world which is so full of life and so full of beautiful things? The world with the sea, which is so vast and goes from one side to another one and then comes back to surround it all! The world where you look up and suddenly there is a whole sky above with the universe and the planets and the universes beyond the universes we can barely begin to imagine.
Everything is one. It’s just life. Life–which I perceive through the lens of me. I need to learn about what makes me me, so I can make good use of time, which I have so abundantly received. I need to study myself to learn about the world without alien filters.
Time to stand up and stretch my back. Time to move on.
Thank you for the time we have spent together.
Thank you for showing me everything that makes you you.
🌀
Since this was originally an audio recording, I’ve used parts of this letter to narrate the video diary I created in this powerful time of transition. It is one of these few pieces of myself that I revisit every now and then, and it puts me in a beautifully emotional state. Here’s the video (youtube link).