To carry the memory of smallness

Hello, fraternal spirit. I know you’ve been in a deep desolation for some time. Yet I also know that you care enough to at least glance at this letter, not out of obligation or any forced concern for me, but because you acknowledge my existence — because I happen to be one of the very few things whose existence you truly recognize.

I’ve had periods like this too. In fact, I am in one even now. It isn’t about getting out of it. Because when loneliness drags on for years, it stops being a feeling and begins to shape your mind itself, until you no longer perceive it as pain but as a kind of background noise, like a disturbance you’ve grown accustomed to long before. In doing so, it teaches you not just how to be alone, but how to be the only one who is alone.

I know your loyalty to yourself, and I respect it. Even being in this state, even suffering, is in some way a result of not betraying yourself. I know people. I used to spend long stretches of time with them once. Talking with them. Laughing with them. Living with them. It was long ago. Yet the memories remain strangely fresh, as if they happened only days ago, because I keep turning them over in my mind, almost like artifacts of a lost civilization.

When you look at them, you notice how they “reduce” themselves in order to be socially accepted. Because to achieve that, one must prune oneself down. A wild lion can never truly merge with the lions in a zoo unless it sheds its wildness. Yet that very wildness is what makes it a lion. A lion that is tamed is not a lion anymore. The others resemble dolls, puppets placed there for visitors to watch. And this is exactly what society demands: “Don’t be yourself.”

You do not do this. Neither have I. It seems we cannot. It isn’t even a choice. We are addicted to depth. Others manage without complexity. I find that astonishing, because they are not dependent on thought. For them, contemplation is optional. For us, what is at stake is becoming thought itself, and it is precisely for this reason that we keep struggling within this endless, eternal solitude.

When I tried to speak with them, everything backfired. I spoke to them about building one’s own values. They brushed it off, saying I was “too unnecessarily serious.” I spoke to them about using one’s own words. They cursed and said I was “obsessing over petty details.” I spoke to them about having one’s own thoughts. They laughed and said, “You see yourself as above everyone else.”

Communication with them is impossible. Because we use our own language. And they use theirs. You cannot merge the language of Siberia with the language of the Sahara. The desert is at ease. It seeks comfort. It promotes laziness. People are entangled within it. There is a constant clamor and noise. We, the northerners, raised in those years without daylight, in that cold air within the wild, at the edges of peaks that overlook the whole settlements from afar — how could we ever form any kind of relationship with caravan people other than plundering their goods, and them in turn standing on guard against us?

We truly plundered many things from them. Everything they believed belonged to them: their ethnicity, their culture, their religions. We razed and erased them all, and with the spoils we took from that, we ended up as godless, rootless, immoral unbelievers without ethnicity, religion, or culture. I use the word “unbeliever” in its most reverent sense, because to become free, one must first commit sins. The two of us are too sinful. Perhaps that is why all this torment befalls us. So what are we to do then? Pray to God? That is… pray to ourselves? And what if we ourselves do not answer? That must be what is happening to you as well.

I didn’t tell you: I once had a friend. His legs did not work. He walked with crutches. We had long conversations together. Most of the time, we communicated through letters, because he refused to go outside. It was not that he could not go out. It was refusal. He was serene in his own world. Can you believe it? He never spoke of being “left out of life.” Because he had relocated life. He had built his own. And besides, what even is the thing society calls “life”?

Even though I no longer see him, he reminds me that everything happens within the mind. The world is something the mind processes, not something that processes the mind. You have lost yourself in your own world. This is likely the cost of living entirely within your own life. Because when you determine everything yourself, if what you determine turns out to be wrong, it can become catastrophic. To be your own dictator means to go unopposed. It is freedom. At the same time, it is also a kind of self-tyranny.

You think too much. I am saying this as someone merged with thought itself. And not even as a complaint. As an observation. That is why you are in this state. You still have not learned how to step outside your own mind, because actually you chose to rule entirely within it — or at least, through everything you went through, you became someone who wanted that, even if it was not a completely free choice. Yet the world is not nearly as vast, as deep, or as complex as it is inside your mind.

Go down to the city. Walk into its streets. See the shallowness there, the indifference. See that people are not even really thinking. You, a sacred spirit lost not in streets but in ideas — do you, in this excess of thinking, imagine that the world too is lost in thought the way you are? It is not. Society is a very simple thing. But your solitude seems to make you forget that, because becoming accustomed to the air of the heights places a pressure upon you.

I go down to the city in my most chaotic periods, to breathe in its hollow air and find some measure of relief, because in those times the heights become truly unbearable. Sometimes we must remember smallness. But one should not grow too accustomed to it, because then the soul itself begins to shrink.

So after placing the memory of society back into my mind once more, I leave the city and climb to the heights again. Its memory lingers in my mind. It reminds me that there are those who exist far below me. But as silence stretches on, that memory begins to decay, and the world once again starts to appear to me as something vast and complex.

Yet this is only the result of a kind of mental manipulation. Because the mind of a person is, in truth, the universe itself, and everything within it is therefore more magnificent than it ordinarily is. And when measured against the reality of the outer world, this is rarely consistent.

So I descend again. Then I ascend again. It is a cycle. The city is nothing more than a tool I use to temporarily ease my loneliness by feeding on its memory like a parasite. One should not remain in it too long. But one should not sever oneself from it entirely either. One must live at its edge without dissolving into it. Like exposing oneself briefly to ordinary life so one’s mind does not drift into sublime abstraction. Or else, the mind might grow too large to measure against external reality.

You, however, seem to have completely severed yourself. And so, you drift from one torment to another in just a few hours. The universe does not concern others. They are unaware of existence itself. They think only of their own lives and what happens around them. Whereas you are someone who has sacrificed your entire life for the sake of the universe and existence.

Do you know this? The only thing you may need to do is to mingle, even slightly, among people — not to speak with them, not to be entertained, not to pour yourself out, but simply to witness how easily they can be happy, how easily they can talk, how easily they can live, because of how simple the mechanisms they actually are.

I know we had withdrawn into this cathedral together to escape the noise of civilization. Just the two of us. A whole building, entirely ours. There were days we spent in separate rooms, never stepping out from behind those walls, writing and reading, or simply sinking into thoughts and dreams. But now I realize — and I do not say this as a flaw — that even the most unerring religious rituals carry a weakness: inviolability. And when something becomes inviolable, it also begins to dissolve, to fade away.

Sincerely yours,

Atrona.