An old piece. A new form.
I made a five-minute video for this because language alone was never enough.
This one is meant to be entered, not explained.
I drifted, far from home. Far from where I felt I belonged.
Until I was offered a glimpse into a sanctuary for the parts of me that don’t speak in language.
It wasn’t an escape.
It was a return.
For most of my life, I preached a whole philosophy around flowing with life. I believed in surrender, in letting the moment unfold whatever it had in store.
Over time, it became part of me. I tried to live by it and reshaped my identity around it. I used to call those mental compulsions. When someone says something too often, it’s usually not to convince others.
It’s to convince themselves.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot why it all mattered.
Lately, I’ve felt a version of myself return.
Detached,
like I was watching life from the outside,
too quiet to interrupt.
I was surrounded by so much noise
that I could no longer hear myself.
When I looked around,
I saw the same.
I wasn’t alone in the world.
People were in the same room,
in the same conversation
but they never truly met.
Their eyes glanced
but didn’t really see.
Words floated,
but they never landed.
We were all there,
but not really with each other.
Looking without seeing.
Speaking without letting
the words touch.
The only connection that existed was through filling the same silences.
We shared the same days, but somehow missed each other entirely.
We weren’t alone.
We were just surrounded by noise.
Imprisoned inside internal voices of unmet expectations and unresolved emotions.
Until a single dangling question mark, holding the keys to my origins, took me to Amsterdam last Thursday.
For three days at Dekmantel Festival, music did what language so often fails to do.
No one asked for names,
yet somehow,
in a forest full of strangers,
everyone felt familiar.
Even in silence,
everyone was understood.
The need to explain dissolved.
I became a spark
in someone else’s night,
a soft detail in their story.
Rhythm alone held us.
Presence alone defined us.
We became part of something unscripted.
No one thought.
Everyone surrendered.
The same song played different versions of truth in each of us.
Music cast a spell that gave language to my soul, moving through like it remembered something I didn’t.
Every move stirred something buried.
A desire I had without a name.
A language I needed to speak without sound.
Nothing was asked,
but everything was given.
Every cell responded.
I let the softness I had hidden for survival surface,
unashamed and raw.
Then a wavelength hit me.
We were tuned to the same frequency, carrying a signal only the body could translate.
I saw him, and he saw me.
A recognition passed between us as we surrendered to the rhythm in the same way.
Dancing is my purge, the place where I don’t perform.
All the masks I’ve curated for myself, I let them unfold.
His was a tender heart, long at war with perfection, cloaked in labels
mistaken for identity.
I knew that mask because I wore it too.
Yet the way he moved made me trust the moment.
The melody spoke to him, and I had never admired something more.
I knew he was purging too.
We didn’t speak, but something passed between us.
Our bodies gave our souls a voice, speaking in a dialect only we could understand.
It didn’t come through conversation.
It came from the sound of the moment.
I was certain we had met before.
A place before names.
A time before forms.
Above the stories and beyond the roles.
The version of him I met wasn’t built.
It was revealed.
Buried beneath what the world had named him.
A self that only wakes in the presence of someone who knows how to summon.
Before the world returned, he was there.
The one who didn’t lie.
The one who didn’t need to perform.
Even if it didn’t come from something real, a gaze whispered what lifetimes couldn’t teach:
I remember who you are beneath who you’ve become.
The exact moment I know he’d picture in his mind, if he is reading these words, was the way we remembered without needing to speak.
Even so, the quiet heartbreak arrives when moments show you they are mortal. What I saw then was gone the next day.
The story ended when we stopped feeling real.
I had nothing to say to him when he spoke like a stranger.
Dances that don’t return, they echo.
Some connections aren’t meant to last,
but to honour what was meant to be awakened.
Some people aren’t meant to be followed,
but to be remembered.
For the way they looked at you without trying to define.
For their presence that lingered even when they didn’t stay.
Authour’s note:
I’ve been working on this video for four days. I do it with so much heart because I’m in love with creativity and exploring it in all sorts of ways is what gives me the biggest joy. Paid subscriptions help sustain this level of depth, experimentation, and presence so this kind of video work can keep growing in the way it already is.
If this space has ever made you feel seen, steadied, or quietly accompanied, and if you’re in a position to do so, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to support the work and keep it alive.
