Look up, Elias

​

The sky, circling in blue and orange has

turned into an alchemist?

Elias has stopped trying to name it.

Orange into blue into something

that has no colour yet,

the colour of light that arrives

near the end of things

and seems to know it,

seems to be

watching back, in greys.

Elias keeps walking.

This is the whole discipline now —

to keep walking

under a sky of vapid judgment

and not turn away 

and not explain yourself

to anyone,

not even to yourself,

specially not to yourself

not anymore.

We are not

the rational creators

we tell ourselves we are.

We do not choose towards joy.

We choose away from the face

we are afraid to meet later —

the older self

standing at the back of every room

we ever entered,

arms folded,

already knowing how it ends.

Elias chose some things for that reason.

The safe harbor.

The door not opened.

The words not spoken

on an evening in another city

that he can still locate exactly

in his body

thirty years later.

He was trying to protect himself

from regret.

He did not know

that unlived life

accrues its own interest,

His fear was right —

to choose is to lose

what was not chosen,

but not to choose

is to lose everything,

including the self

that might have done the choosing.

The unchosen accumulate.

That is what no one tells you.

They do not disappear

when you decide against them.

They stand at the edges of the field

in weather like this,

patient,

unhurried,

waiting for the colours

to catch up.

The mistakes are not

the worst of it.

The mistakes had weight,

had consequence,

had the dignity of having

actually happened.

You can walk the perimeter of a mistake.

You can know its dimensions.

It is the unlived things

that have no edges —

the person you might have become

in a different city,

the love you almost let

be as large as it wanted to be,

the room you stood outside

and did not enter

because entering felt

too much like falling.

The sky deepens.

He does not look up.

He has made his peace

with most of it,

or made something

that resembles peace

from a sufficient distance,

which may be

all that is available now.

The field is wide.

Elias is small in it.

He knew this would happen —

not the field exactly,

but the feeling,

the late light,

the sense of being

a figure in a landscape

that was always larger

than his plans for it.

He keeps walking

because the body still insists,

because stopping

would require a reason

and Elias has outlasted

most of his reasons,

because somewhere ahead

the field ends

and he would like to see

where.

Not with urgency.

Not with fear.

Just with the quiet

faithful attention

of someone who has learned,

too late and exactly on time,

that the present moment

was always the point,

that the sky was always

doing something extraordinary

above whatever field he crossed,

and that he looked up

far less often

than he should have.

Truth

At first glance, the young woman crossing the street seems to be wearing a joke. But the line on her shirt carries more than humor: “I always arrive a little late, like the truth.” 

That feels familiar. Clarity often comes after the moment has passed — after the argument, after the wound, after the chance to speak cleanly has gone. We laugh because the line is true in a way that stings.

Truth is closer to weather: shifting, gathering, breaking, clearing. What we call truth often changes as memory reshapes our experiences. A trauma revisited years later may not match the raw fact of what happened years ago— but that does not make it false. It only means we are now able to recognise what the event felt like from the inside.

That is where the old problem of perspective begins. In Rashomon, truth is not one thing sitting at the centre, waiting to be found. It breaks into pieces, each reflecting a different need, fear, or desperation. Nietzsche suspected as much: there is no view from nowhere. Every truth is seen from somewhere — through a body, a history, a particular set of losses. We are never outside the feeling we are trying to describe.

Contradictory truths, then, do not cancel each other out so much as coexist. One person stands in the rain and feels refreshed; another feels trapped. Neither is lying. 

They are merely living from different emotional climates. What changes over time is not truth itself, but our capacity to see more of it. We grow into new angles. We notice different edges of the same stone.

That is why the woman’s shirt works so well as a line for the street — and for life. It speaks to how late understanding often arrives, but also to how patient truth can be. It does not always come with certainty. It can come back in fragments, in revised memory, in a quieter and more honest conversation with ourselves.

Truth isn’t a final verdict. It’s a dialogue that keeps adjusting to the shape of our human lives. 

Overpass

We are going somewhere.

That is all.

The surface is harder than field,

the smell is wrong,

there is noise from below

that does not mean anything we know,

but the body moves

because the body knows

to move,

because movement is not decision

so much as continuation,

the way breathing continues,

the way the herd continues,

one body following warmth

of the body ahead.

We do not know we are ascending.

We know the angle of the ground

under our hooves.

We know the one in front

is still moving.

That is enough.

The boys are there.

We know that too —

the particular electricity of watching,

the way attention has pressure,

the way humans leak intention

from every part of themselves

and think they are being still.

But they are not for us.

They are just another condition,

like wind,

like smell of rain coming,

like the low sound the ground makes

near water.

We do not perform. 

We never performed.

Berger said you withdrew from us

the moment you no longer needed us,

that the look across the fence

became one-sided,

became yours,

became a mirror

you held up to yourselves

and called nature.

We did not withdraw.

We never withdrew.

We were always just here,

doing this,

going somewhere,

in the way that going somewhere

has always meant for us —

not arrival,

not spectacle,

not the clean narrative arc

your minds require,

just the next step,

and the one after,

and the warmth of the one ahead.

Morton would say

you cannot help it —

the mesh of things

is too large for the human eye

to hold without frame,

and so you make us theater,

make the swarm a wonder,

make the migration a story

with a beginning and an end

and a meaning

that was never ours to give.

We are not indifferent to you.

Indifference would require

that we first considered you central.

We are only

moving.

The overpass beneath our hooves

was not made for us.

We do not know that.

We know it holds.

The boys point.

One laughs.

One goes quiet in a way

that might, in twenty years,

become a thought.

We go over the top

and begin to descend

the other side

where they cannot see us anymore

and we continue

exactly as before

because we were never

performing.

We were never

for them.

We were going somewhere.

That is all.

That was always all.