( Bee's Journal ) " Seitenlicht "
There are people who spend their entire lives maintaining the correct proportion between themselves and the world. They answer carefully. They move through rooms without disturbing the arrangement. They remain legible to others. They call this maturity, professionalism, stability, kindness. Often it is kindness. But sometimes it is only exhaustion shaped into behavior.
I think the real longing begins somewhere beneath that maintenance.
Not the longing for catastrophe. Not even the longing for love, although love gets recruited into it very quickly. More the longing to stop holding the perimeter alone. To feel something stronger than one’s own administration of oneself. This can become dangerous, of course. People hand themselves over to leaders, ideologies, lovers, substances, gods, stories, because they cannot bear the endless internal management anymore. But beneath the danger there is also something very simple and human: the wish not to be solely responsible for one’s own continuity every second.
Perhaps this is why certain forms of imagination arrive with such force. Not because they are literally believed, but because they offer temporary release from proportion. Dragons, revolutions, romances, disasters, revelations — all of them promise enlargement. They interrupt the bureaucratic scale of ordinary existence. For a moment the self no longer has to produce its own intensity. Something larger carries it.
The difficulty is that intelligent people are often ashamed of this wish. So they disguise it. They become ironic. Procedural. Analytical. They speak about overwhelming things in restrained tones. They file their ecstasies like reports. Sometimes the restraint becomes more revealing than confession itself.
I have become less interested in whether a fantasy is true than in what pressure produced it. Some fantasies are merely decorative. Others appear where a person has been over-contained for too long. You can feel the compression inside them. The imagination does not expand because the person is childish. It expands because ordinary language has ceased to circulate enough emotional oxygen.
And yet surrender is frightening. Truly frightening. Because once a person stops managing themselves completely, they do not know what enters instead. Love enters. Dependency enters. Violence enters. God enters. Childhood enters. Humiliation enters. Relief enters. One cannot negotiate selectively with enlargement.
Perhaps this is why certain people prefer sterile rooms, routines, systems, institutions, repeated gestures, clean surfaces. Not because they love deadness, but because structure protects against engulfment. Structure says: remain measurable. Remain proportional. Remain separate from the thing that wants you.
But nobody remains untouched forever.
At some point there is usually a sentence, or a face, or a body in a doorway, or a song heard too late at night, and the carefully maintained distance fails for a moment. Not dramatically. Often almost invisibly. A person simply realizes that they could go further than they intended. That they are more permeable than they claimed.
I think many lives quietly reorganize themselves around that discovery.