I feel heavy today. Not a bad and foul heavy, but a soft and deep heavy. Kind of sweet heavy. It dwells under my eyes as it wells up there. I like that feeling now. As I feel the weight of absent tears, I sense the newly-forming creases around my eyes. And I like them too. I feel aged, but more than that, I feel wiser. Like I have learned things and they marked me on my skin. Most likely tho, these creases are the result of my stubbornness. I didn't wear sunglasses in Mexico and then in Turkey. Both sunny. Not like our Toronto. I had to squint half of the time.

I remember the wisdom of my friend Philippe when I feel like this nowadays. I had always respected and admired him for his openness and astuteness, but until a couple of months ago I couldn't understand a phrase he so casually uttered a year or so ago.
"I appreciate the heaviness of spirit," he had said in his soft and resolute voice.
That felt foreign and undecipherable at the time. "Why would anyone like that?" I had asked myself, sitting on the grass and leaning backwards on my elbows.
Now I get it. Maybe because I feel it. That's gratitude for solitude. For being alone but not lonely. For meeting gods. For hearing their command as an offering. For coming to love myself in pain, and even in agony.

I feel heavy today. For reasons not so clear. For reasons I don't really care to dissect and analyze. For reasons I simply feel.
I feel exhausted today. My body aches. And it feels sweet. Like those aches I used to get after a long football practice where I scored a few fabulous goals. I feel the hands of my teammates patting me on the back.
"That shit was gold," one of them says with a smile on his cheeks.
"Not without your assist," I grin back.

I was reading a book at Starbucks as I sipped on coffee. A Turkish book. First one I'm reading after many years. "Literature Therapy" it's called. Written by a Turkish clinical psychologist who loved reading existential writers because they helped her work through life and trauma.
I picked it up yesterday maybe because I wrote a book for the same reason in the last two months. To therapise myself. To come to terms with my life - all the pain I inflicted on others and felt in my own flesh.
I stopped reading after a few pages on Virginia Woolf and "inner dialogue." It hit me hard. And a song came on my headphones. A Turkish one about two young guys we lost to police violence during the Turkish version of "Arab Spring," Gezi Park'i Riots. It all got too heavy. My eyes weighed down. My flesh sagged under a burden. And it all felt sweet. A soft and patient gift.

About thinking, Plato had said something like: it is a silent conversation between me and I. A conversation within oneself where two sides of the conversation are played out by the same person. Which is to say, to think and not to feel oppressed by thinking, one needs to learn how to become a good friend to himself. Learn to hold one's own hand and listen even if there are no words to be spoken.
I sucked at that for a long time. People thought I was a thinker. I mean, how could they not! I studied philosophy. Gotta be a deep thinker, right? Not really. I despaired in thinking. So I didn't think. I couldn't be a good friend to myself so I did everything not to think.
And when I say thinking, don't assume thinking is this cerebral process. That's more like calculation, analysis and conceptual dissection. Thinking feels. It fucking pains. It uncovers truths which can then uproot one's life. Thinking feels through and through. Thinking is not about abstraction. At least the valuable and existential kind of thinking. It's a deep and precious conversation. It requires patience, softness and acceptance.
I couldn't do that. I couldn't genuinely think. So I wrote a philosophy thesis about what it means to be transformed. Didn't help either. I couldn't be transformed. Maybe too much abstraction. Maybe too much Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Maybe too little of me. And what was there of me laid hidden under the words of others.

But in the last three years I have learned something. One really valuable thing about life. Maybe the most valuable thing in life. To be a good friend to my friends. Not always. Not all the time. But I learned bits of it. I learned how to go beyond me into the lives of others. In care. In newly-budding compassion. In love which I had not felt until a few years ago.
I think now I can sit in heaviness and pain because I'm beginning to learn how to be a good friend to myself. Because I can sit in silence with myself.

I watch smoke rise from the tip of my cigarette resting on the ashtray. Smoke is fleshy, you know. Like really fleshy. I didn't think that before. Smoke seemed ethereal, dancing with the slightest change in the air. But it's fleshy. Smoke is thick. It moves like a beautiful woman. Like Silka.
I vaped for a few years. It allowed me not to be a smoker. Self-delusion, I know. And vaping felt like a curse. A curse I couldn't drop from my hands.
Smoking now, feels like a gift. Not just the smoking part, but carrying a pouch of tobacco, rolling papers, filter tips and a lighter in my side bag. Rolling the tobacco, seeing it spill on my pants and letting the tip run out. It all feels precious. Maybe because within smoke, I found peace. Maybe because I discovered solitude in those moments I stepped outside, took a break from writing my book and gifted a filter tip to an Italian guy in need. Maybe this one is a self-delusion too. I couldn't care.
Maybe I met gods within that smoke. Heard them for the first time in smoke-filled silence. I'm happy to be deluded like that. If gods who turned me towards honesty, silence, faith and solitude are a part of my delusion, I'm faithfully deluded nowadays. I hope to stay deluded. Life is so precious once gods appear. Even pain is a gift with gods on my side. I learned to respect gods in the last three months. I learned to hear them in the words of others, divine faces gathered on the countenance of friends and strangers. I like living like this. It's all too precious. Like a gift from the sky. 

D 3/5/2023