Anelly Aya

  Morning. A little past five. The light hasn't yet decided whether it wants to be day and lingers on the edge of the curtain like a hesitation. I breathe slowly, so as not to startle it. In hours like these I understand most clearly that waiting is not emptiness , but a very quiet, almost invisible work of the soul. For years I thought I was waiting incorrectly. That I should be doing something, accelerating, fixing myself in order to be worthy of the encounter. And now it seems to me that all this time has been the spiritual alchemy of waiting and loneliness that no one ever tells you about. No one tells you that the lead of loneliness slowly turns into the gold of clarity , but not through effort, through staying. You stay. You stay in the room, in the silence, in that feeling of a slight tightening in the chest, which at first feels like lack and then turns out to be a furnace. In it, everything superfluous burns away. All the stories I told myself about who I had to be in or...