There are lives that perish quietly, not in the violence of catastrophe, but in the slow suffocation of emptiness. I know this, for mine was almost such a life. I had nothing no companions, no homeland of the soul, no warmth of family, no tenderness of friends, no belonging in this city I loathed. What remained was only the raw residue of existence: my thoughts, my wounds, my solitude.
And yet, in that desert of nothingness, two instruments remained: a notebook and a pen. What strange cruelty, that a life stripped bare would still leave these two relics behind. What stranger mercy, that they were enough to save me.
At first, I believed writing to be an ornament, a pastime. I thought poetry was beautiful because it decorated pain with elegance. But I soon learned that poetry is no decoration. Poetry is dissection. It is the knife that slices open the chest, forces one to witness the silent machinery of suffering. It does not console it confronts. It holds before you the grotesque fact of your own survival, and demands: “How much can you endure? How much can you transmute?”
When I wrote, I bled. Not metaphorically no, metaphor is too weak a word. The pen was a vein, the page a wound, and the ink was the proof that I had not been erased. My existence was validated by the words I carved into silence. What I could not bear in life, I could at least bear in language.
And then came the revelation: when I returned to those old words, I did not recognize the one who had written them. I looked at my own handwriting and whispered, Oh damn. I did that. I survived that. In that moment, I understood something terrifying and divine: the self who suffers is not the same self who survives. Writing is the bridge between them. Writing is the resurrection of a self that should have perished.
Thus, writing did not simply “save” me. It transformed me. It turned despair into creation, solitude into testimony, pain into permanence. When all else abandoned me, writing remained faithful. When the world closed its doors, the page opened itself to me, endlessly patient, endlessly receiving.
Yes, poetry is patient. Yes, writing is strong. Stronger than family, stronger than friendship, stronger even than love, for all these can betray. The pen does not betray. The page does not abandon. They demand nothing but truth, and in exchange, they grant immortality.
To those who say art is luxury, I answer: no. Art is necessity. It is as necessary as air, for when the lungs collapse under grief, it is words that breathe. Writing is not about “expressing oneself.” Writing is about surviving oneself.
Therefore I say this: I would not exist without writing. I would not have endured this city I hated, this loneliness that gnawed, this silence that sought to bury me. Writing was my rebellion against nonexistence, my refusal to be erased.
And if I stand here now, still breathing, it is not because of the world. It is not because of people. It is because of the notebook and the pen because of the sacred act of writing, which took a dying soul and taught it how to speak.