The fake life

To describe something, that's easy. You focus on it, like there's nothing else in the world, capture it in the eye of your mind. What does it look like? How does it taste? What sounds does it make? All that assembles inside you, like a pale reflection of your perception, like the a candle capturing the sunlight. But it works.


You take it all in... and then let it all out. Like breathing. In and out: words pour from your quill, conjuring the essential nature of that being described into the perfect form of black over white. Words, phrases... capturing the truth and yet, hiding it. And then, breath life into it: what story does the description entail? What problems, adventures, twists, does it hide? What people live it and how do they deal with those elements? In doing so, the description is complete, in esthetics but also in its essence, for it has become full fragment of the world.

Let me show you, it's pretty easy.

Take that leaf over there, for example. It's deep green with slight signs of yellow here and there, moving graciously in the afternoon breeze as it falls from its place into its death. It smells fresh, for life hasn't yet abandoned it completely, but corruption sinks in as each drop of savia escapes. And yet, in its final moments, it dances in the air, from one place to another, a dance of such beauty and passion that the whole world watches in silent awe; a dance that will never happen again, and hasn't taken place before, the dance of this leaf, this tree, this death. Death is a dance afterall, a long or short dance we all perform before the final bow and the fall of the last curtain.

See? That wasn't hard. Expelling the image from your mind is the easy part, it always is; even if something is wrong, you can always go back and correct it, expand on it, erase it... the difficult thing is to leave your quill and focus on the real leaf and its dance. No one actually cares about it, it doesn't matter that it's unique, it's just a leaf on a wind, too small, too unimportant for our busy days. The difficult thing isn't to describe it in detail, to grant it a few minutes of your life to capture its essence and pour it into place on the page.

No, the difficult thing is to step out and dance with it. Paper, quill, words... all that is but fake life. We remain here, behind our eyes, watching life go by, reflecting and describing it, telling its tales and watching its stories. We live fake lifes, we watch fake lifes, we enjoy fake lifes. But none of those are real, they are only there: easy, accessible, without commitment or demands. The road that we like to walk even though it leads nowhere.

But, sometimes, you meet someone who has seen the leaf fall but didn't have a quill at hand. Someone that went into the wind and forgot their own defense, their own mask, their own description of the story and dived deep into the story itself, joining in the dance. That is the moment you see true bravery, not that of the movies where the hero fights the dragon... no, the daily bravery of someone that's willing to step out of their boundaries, fight their barriers, leave their weaknesses behind and dance with the wind, with the leaf, with death.

So come, take my hand, stop reading this. Know that there is no life without death, but there is life without dance. But, is that a true life, or are we just fooling ourselves behind our masks, protected from our enemies... but also our friends and ourselves? No, forget all that! Come, just take my hand, dance with me in the wind, dance with the leaf and build your story, don't tell one you are just a spectator to.

For this is your story. Yours and yours alone. But you only have one try to get it right and tell the story you want to tell. Use it wisely, use it bravely but, most of all, use it! Leave yourself, so you can really live.