DEPECHE MODE: "Enjoy The Silence"

Life has twists, and many different endings. It’s a rope, that fixes or strangles, that binds, entangles. There’s never a way back, not to the good times, not to the bad times. For times will never be the same again. We run to the other side of a hanging bridge of which the ropes have been cut on one side. A first wrinkle appears, like a crack on the ceiling. It’s the first time I notice it in a friend’s face. After growing up, we now grow older. And we grow elsewhere, for we may have roots, but still can be planted anywhere else.

It feels a bit strange to take a break from hectic city-life and retreat in a more rural hide-out called place of birth. Wearing new shoes is never easy and it takes more to find peace than just to slow down the pace. I recognize the silence of my childhood days. It’s as if I opened a long-forgotten box in a dusty attic and find the snoring of the fridge and the ticking of the standing clock in my grandma’s living room just as I left it years ago. What happened to those years? They passed by like the white clouds parading in the window. The yellow fields bow humbly. A pigeon rests on the roof. Time leaves no traces and the sky no impact.

I feel like spending some days of a writer’s life, or at least the hermit life I imagine it to be. Shelter inside, undistracted by the unwanted opinions of others, take a nap in between some paragraphs, chase lucidity in a forest of dark thoughts, having a bottle of wine for dinner. It’s not the right time for it now, but I did have that vision on a holiday last year, when I was lazing in a hammock in one of the lodges in the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. The vision of spending a month in a remote area, with the mere purpose of spending the day writing that once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece you always promised yourself to write one day. I worship laziness now and empty my mind; a fresh wind fills the temple after the monk opens the heavy wooden doors.