Conversations I Never Had.

Just ask.

Mar 02, 2025

I want to be the wind. It wasn’t always so. I used to want to be a man. For a while, I carried myself like a man, too. But not now. Now I want to be the wind. I suppose it hit me when my skin crumpled like a prune and the mirror looked dirty except it wasn’t. It was just me.

Time is like drinking out of a glass with no bottom. It just goes. Time is returning to your hometown to discover the tree that supported your back on lonely nights and summers has become nothing more but a dull stump. Sliced away like the time you’ll never get back. Time is sitting on that stump and wondering where the hell you fit in in all of it. Envying the wind.

Conversations I’ve never had lay scattered across my living room like snake skins. Transparent and dried out, remnants to what could’ve been. My neighbour says I never look her in the eye anymore. In truth, I’m avoiding the snake skins, the things I wished someone would’ve said to me, or I said to them, in the hopes that such conversation could’ve brought me onto a better path.

If I was the wind, I wouldn’t feel so rooted to a place I have no business being. If I was the wind, I could soar between lips and nudge them into kissing. If I was the wind, I would flitter to make people say things they otherwise never would. If I was the wind, I’d fly back to the time when I was a boy, a man, a person—and I would ask him,

What did the world look like before you were told what it was?
It was green and blue and white, and the earth smelled like remembering. Small things looked bigger. The street my house was on was a continent. My house was a country. The woods were the ocean, the sea was the sky. Grandma’s soup smelled like safety. Salty, like the sigh after a cry when tears slide onto your tongue.

Where does time feel the softest?
The softest skin lies in the crux between your elbow and your arm. In the same way, time’s pivot from darkness to lightness is softest at the kernel of its parting axis. The white celluloid of post-sunrise light emanates as if the sun beams with greater freshness. In such moments, I can close my eyes and let the world light my lids like a cinema screen. I can sit back, soft and supple, and I can dream.

Can you see me for who I am, or only for who I am when I interact with you?
The default state of the modern platonic relationship seems to be that of transaction. People are cast like roles in the film of our lives, and the writing is often paper thin. Can you look passed what you cast me for? Can you see me alone and myself, in the dressing room before I meet the audience? I think those who have seen us cry understand with greater depth the many shades of our ‘selves’. The way tears clean the windows of the soul, they let in more light for those who look close enough.

Why did we stop playing?
I can’t tell you why and I can’t tell you when. An unmarked day became a tragedy. The day we stop playing. Toys deserted like hurricane items across the rubble. The day we stopped playing the world became dry. Let us play again. Let us play with air and marbles and find light in ridiculous things.

Where do dreams go when you stop chasing them?
They hang just above your head on invisible strings. If you’ve put in the work, they’ll stick around until they hit you square in the face. Funny, isn’t it? How we repel the things we want too much. When we surrender to the possibility of losing the object of desire, opportunity wafts them in without any effort.

What’s the loneliest sound you’ve ever heard?
The loneliest sound is so subtle one hardly hears it with strained ears. Camouflaged, it’s veiled in the ordinary sound waves of normality. Only the well-trained ear detects the wails of its frequency. It sounds much like, ‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ or ‘That’s alright,’ or even, ‘No problem.’ Beneath such normal talk lies a quiet desperation of men screaming behind their eyes. Thoreau says such men carry their songs to the grave.1 May the worms and the insects hear them sing if they have passed, or if they are still living, may those sounds escape the shade of the sun and be released.

I write all of this as I sit on my stump and try to merge with the wind. Was what I lived true? False? Only these words of remembering are real. Conversations I never had but could have had. And how easy it could have been to flip some phrases off my tongue at any mundane party. But no, all these questions, I held in. All these wonderings, I let die.

Not anymore. I must be the repository for all the stories still in me. Like the wind that pulls pollen up and around the world to spread greater growth, I must let myself be taken. Perhaps becoming the wind is less about trying and more about letting go. My ‘self’ as I have come to know is nothing more than an eastward gust. It shall live and it shall die. My existence is grateful for its chance.

My papers scramble. Words are lost. The wind shooed them away. I feel myself tipping now, not into darkness or into light, but into a translucent ravine. If I become the wind there’d be no better time. No way to stop, I must fall without expectation of landing. I whisk, I writhe, I breeze, I thunder. Am I the wind? I’ll always wonder.

-iL.

I wrote this piece after speaking with a friend of mine about a near-death experience he had. He mentioned that during a very dark period in his life he wanted someone to simply ask him if he was okay. No one did. He felt alone. He felt like no one cared. The conversations he never had were left forgotten in the wind. A downward spiral that could’ve gone very wrong, fortunately ended up favourable. He didn’t go down the darkest path. He pulled through. But it got me thinking, it made me think about all the conversations I never had, or the ones I maybe would have wanted to have, and to immortalise them in this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts and perhaps, the questions or answers you would like answered too. Till soon, iL.

Conversations I Never Had.

Just ask.

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