The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation.
He is my stronghold, my refuge and my savior—
from violent people you save me.2 Samuel 22:2-3
You said that in the cave lies my shelter, and on the rock, my deliverance. So I asked you for a cave — a small place, but safe, where I could breathe without fear. I asked for it with a fervor that no longer knows how to pray beautifully. I did not ask for miracles, only for a little space to be human again, to gather the scattered pieces of my life. I did not receive it. You speak of shelter as if it were mine by nature. It is not. And so I have come to feel justified in not being able to move forward.
I feel poor in life. Not in money or possessions, but in life itself — in breath, in the strength to desire something without paying for it with another part of myself. It is as if every breath were taken on credit, and every moment a loan from something that means to have me back empty. This is the poverty I mean: existence itself as a debt, drawn down by the hour.
People speak of courage, of fighting, of never giving up. They do not understand that there is a condition in which living is not courage but absurd resistance — where whatever I choose, I lose, and every gain is only a temporary correction of loss, a way of climbing one step only to feel more sharply how steep the ascent remains. The world calls this courage. It is not courage; it is endurance, and endurance is what is left when courage has already spent itself. I do not need to be told to be brave. I need to be told what to do with the exhaustion that bravery leaves behind.
For me, every choice is a choice between losses. Each day is a negotiation between what hurts less and what does not destroy me completely.
I was taught to be my own savior. No one ever said how much that costs. Every time I saved myself, I lost a part of me: gentleness, trust, hope. Being your own savior sounds noble, but it devours the part of you it claims to save. I am tired of being at once the hero and the victim. I am tired of believing that your love for me is proven through trials. How many trials must there be before I learn that there is nothing left to learn — that the lesson was never the point?
I am weary of living between lack and hope, between the shelter that never comes and the rock I no longer have the strength to climb. I hold on to life like someone who knows they have nothing left, yet still searches their empty pockets. A poor soul, clinging to a life there is nothing left to live from.
And yet. Perhaps the only wealth I have left is my word, and it is worth something only because you hear it. I asked you for a cave, and you gave me none — but here, in the speaking, is the small place where I can breathe.
Note: Without intending it, this text breathes from the same silence in which Arghezi’s Psalms, Macedonski’s “Noaptea de decemvrie”, and Hamsun’s “Hunger” were written.
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