Another day with hours of drawing, music and listening to audiobooks while drinking several litres of coffee. This morning you got the job you applied for. Today was a good day. You couldn’t bring yourself to eat something, but maybe that would work later. 

Your flatmate read you Russian poems while you were drawing carefully and that was very nice. 

Of the pearl’s light and agate’s clouds
Of the such fairly smoked glass,
By slopes of so sudden mounds,
She sailed such solemnly in skies –
As if the Moon Sonata’s sounds
Had cut our roadway at once.

- Appearance of the Moon 

(From "The Moon in Zenith") 1942-1944,

Anna Akhmatova

You don’t know why you never considered Russian to be a beautiful language, but through the word by word translations you could get a feeling for how Russian worked. Your favorite saying of the day was “to grow wild of something”, which was supposed to mean “not being used to something anymore”. You yourself had grown wild of feeling small and misunderstood, you had grewn wild of being mistreated and left behind. But this growing wild had, funnily, made you more certain in what you deserved and what not. So you had also grown wild of being silent and submissive. 

It was a very peaceful day at the canal, the geese were quiet and seemed to enjoy the heavy warmth that sat under the clouds. 

Somehow on this day you reached a new check point. And you hadn’t seen in coming. 

But some part of the dark stinging fire that kept lighting up and splitting you in two, some of it had gone out. 

You don’t know why that happened or how long it was going to stay this way – but it felt like a small but significant stone had dropped off your chest. The memory of a game you played as kids came up, where you pressed your hands with all force against the wood of a doorframe you stood in and when you released them – it felt like your arms where flying up to the ceiling. Just with your heart this time. 

Or as if somebody had attached a balloon to you, filled with helium. Lifting some of the weight for you, so you didn’t have to carry it alone. Could have been all the long talks and loving words you received, that were like a thick medicine you could smear all over yourself and just lie in this big pile of feeling loved. Could have been the Russian poems. Could have been your flatmate telling you, after she flipped through your sketchbook and heard you casually singing:

It’s so annoying. Why are you so talented?

What?!

Are you trying to bully me?

(With a surprised look) No, not at all. Not now. I think

I just have to accept that you are talented in some things.

Especially things I am bad at – that sucks. 

Could have been these reasons and many more – but you knew it was something different. Because when you woke up and started to go on with your day, when you spent hours and hours of drawing, little stuff and big stuff, working out, finally getting some nutrients in your system by 7PM, already shaking at that point; because when you saw the sun setting above the rooftops and color the fluffy clouds cotton candy pink and the sky bubble gum blue, when you listened to Vivaldi and showered, when you sang loudly to your favorite broadway musical and loved your voice every second of it, when you did all the things that make you and make you happy – 

it was like one of your exhales just extinguished a part of that pain. And left a little forgiveness. A little sorrow without the burning hate. Empathy. And a big chunk of inner peace. 

Proud of your art and what you achieved on that day, you inhaled through your nose, noticed that you kept pushing the minutes you spent crying to a minimum these days and your exhale was forced by a giant smile that finally climbed on your lips.