There are children who are born with the world too close.
Noise hurts them,
light overwhelms them,
their bodies become uncertain territory,
and life itself is something to be approached with caution.

While others run outward,
they learn to retreat inward.

There, imagination is born,
quiet sensitivity,
slow observation,
an inner life that becomes refuge.

Growing up this way means learning early
that the world can be excessive,
and that calm is often found
only in silence.

With time, adolescence arrives,
and with it the need to separate,
to leave dependencies behind,
to search for an identity of one’s own,
even when the path is uncertain.

Independence brings relief.
And with relief, life begins to open.

Relationships appear,
friendships,
intense reading,
deep understanding,
the feeling that life, at last,
can be inhabited.

It is not an easy life.
There is effort,
constant adaptation,
a sensitive nervous system
that demands care.

But there is direction.
There is meaning.
And above all,
there is the quiet certainty
that life is beginning to belong.

Sometimes losses arrive,
relationships that end,
grief that leaves its mark.

Then work,
or any meaningful engagement with the world,
becomes an anchor.

Not only as occupation,
but as structure,
as identity,
as a way of holding time together.

And so the years pass,
with fragility and resilience intertwined,
like a worn rope
that, despite its strain,
continues to bear the weight of life.

Until, at some point,
the rope weakens.

Crises arrive.
Deep exhaustion.
Anxiety,
sadness,
the feeling that body and mind
can no longer sustain what once they could.

Life then slows down.
It becomes quieter.
More reduced.

The world continues moving forward,
but some remain in a different rhythm,
as if watching life from the shore
after having swum for years.

And grief appears.

Not only for what never was,
but for what once existed
and now seems lost.

Direction fades,
structure dissolves,
the active identity in the world diminishes.

Yet even then,
small spaces of presence remain:

a quiet activity,
a conversation without demands,
a creative gesture,
a shared moment.

Small bridges.

Bridges between the life that was
and the life that begins to transform.

Existence no longer resembles a rushing river,
but a silent lake.

Slower.
More fragile.
Yet also deeper.

And those who walk along that shore
learn something different:

that life does not always move outward,
that sometimes it withdraws,
turns inward,
becomes contemplative.

And while the world continues in its hurried rhythm,
there are those who keep walking slowly,
holding an intact sensitivity,
a quieter awareness,
a different way of inhabiting time.

It is not the life they imagined,
but neither is it absence.

It is another way of being.
More silent.
More fragile.
More human.

And in that slow walking,
between invisible bridges and deep pauses,
life, though different,
continues to breathe.

Written on April 6, 2026
© Jesus Jordan Parra

What can I say when the lights go out -
pitch black.

I stumble into the mud,
the underworld.

Blindness
deeper than despair.

The urge
to have it all be over.

No voice.
No face.
No breath.
No body.

Heartbeat?

An empty battery
on repeat -
tick, tock.

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?

My self vanishes into thin air,
just like that.

Never born.
Never died.

And yet
a part of me
keeps going through the motions.

A stranger on this earth,
coming from an outer plane -
invisible to mortals.

Bloody feet.
Blistered hands.
Calluses on my forehead.

Primordial cortex
on autopilot.

Bruised

Rolling the boulder upward
over and over -

Forever cursed.

Soul lost on the Milky Way.

© Ute Luppertz 2026

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