"I didn't have anything to offer to anyone except my own confusion." Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

The Road is Life

"I didn't have anything to offer to anyone except my own confusion." Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" 

I think there is a piece of me left in every place I ever visited. That was the root of my problem. I was searching for home and I've never felt so lost. Little fragments of me were splattered all over and I wish I knew what I know now; home doesn't exist. At least not in the way we believe it does. Home isn't the city we grew up in, or our family house. It's not the state or anything geographical. And the biggest mistake we all make; when we're lost we try to find homes in people. I have never known what home felt like. The warmth of something familiar, close to you, that keeps you safe. I found out it doesn't exist. There's no safety in this world. That's just a made-up concept we invented to feel better. I never knew for certain what got me going. Sometimes I feel little flashes of sun, glimmers of happiness; when I was completely and utterly lost. My childhood is left in my memory in picture frames. I remember when my dad was driving me to Tuzla. I've visited a lot of different states and places, yet none of them could match up to the feeling I had when we were going there. There's something about the road, like I could see my whole life between two tracks and a white line. Winter in Bosnia is something special. It was terribly cold, the trees around the road were covered in snow so that every branch looked like a finger from this beautiful pale hand. Looking at a view that some would consider sad; the naked trees, the grey sky and dark forests, I felt every emotion at once. I felt happiness, love, ecstasy, melancholy and nostalgia for places I've never been to. The urge to run away from everything and everyone and never to come back. There is no future in stillness. Every time I went to a place I didn't know, I'd find little pieces of me that somebody left there hundreds of years ago. Home was every place I layed my head on. Your life changes in ways you could not imagine when you travel. That was the exquisite beauty of life; you could always leave. The pain I felt when leaving something, some place close to me, made me grow. We don't mature with age, but only with pain.

I don't believe in God. I don't believe in the afterlife. Death is liberation, and after death comes nothing. But I do believe this; the road I took was life.

"I've never seen beauty without melancholy." – Charles Baudelaire

napisala: Lejla Habota, II2