When Life Turned Into Longing

I write because I can’t carry silence anymore.
I write like someone leaving a note on the table — not to announce an ending, but to say: this is what it feels like inside me.

There was a time when life began to slip away from me, slowly, like a tired guest leaving without saying goodbye.
I wasn’t dying. Not yet.
But the habit of living had wandered off somewhere inside me.

Depression taught me a new word: absence.
Absence of feeling.
Absence of myself.
A flattening that shrinks you, robs you, quiets even desire.

It’s not just sadness.
It’s not just a lack of energy.
It’s a kind of theft — something moving into your body, living in your place.
You lose command of your own gestures.
You stop dreaming. You stop deciding. You just try to breathe.

And then, one day, I couldn’t even do that.

It wasn’t a metaphor.
It was my lungs.
A bronchospasm crisis, a doctor hesitating between a hospital room and the ICU.
I kept thinking: How can I be this unwell?
But my body already knew what my mind couldn’t say.

Fifteen days of hospital.
Physiotherapy, mask, medication.
A routine of survival.

And in that bed, I realized: depression doesn’t just erase the soul.
It begins to suffocate the body, too.

But here’s what I also learned: no one can fight it alone.
I accepted the hand that was extended to me.
My lungs found breath again.

I’m still in the dark.
I don’t always see the help arriving.
But I feel it. Something in the air.
Something coming closer.

Now I understand: life is impossible without air.
But writing is a kind of breathing, too.
Each line is an inhale. Each paragraph, an exhale.
And maybe that’s why I’m still here.

If you’ve ever felt like breathing — or living — was slipping away, know this: even a small exhale is still a beginning.