Natimorto

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  • The Weather Outside and the Weight Within

    There are days when waking up feels heavier than it should. Nothing has happened, exactly. No fresh tragedy, no dramatic rupture, no piece of news capable of explaining the exhaustion. And yet the body wakes as if it has already been through something during the night. The light enters the room differently. The sky hangs low. The air feels too still, too cold, too humid. Before we have even thought anything clearly, we are already living inside a mood.

    Perhaps this is one of the simplest ways of realising that we are not only thought. For a long time, philosophy tried to imagine the human being as a consciousness almost detached from the world, as if thinking were a clean activity, suspended above the body, temperature, light, sleep, and the city. But ordinary life contradicts this every day. We are affected by the coke we have not drunk, by the noise in the street, by excessive brightness, by a grey sky, by the wind touching our skin. The world does not remain outside us. It gets in.

    Spinoza might say that we are made of affects. For him, we are not entirely sovereign beings who decide, in a purely rational way, what to feel. We are crossed by encounters. Certain things increase our power to exist; others diminish it. A sunny day may solve none of our concrete problems, but sometimes it gives the body back a sort of permission. The street seems more possible. The future less sealed. A rainy, dark, heavy day, on the other hand, can make the very same life suddenly feel harder to carry.

    This does not mean that the weather determines who we are. That would be too simple. But it takes part. It gives a colour to what already exists inside us. A sadness that, on a clear day, might fit into a pocket, can take over the whole house on a grey one. A fear that seemed manageable may grow when the sky itself appears to have no exit. The weather does not invent everything, but it intensifies. It changes the inner lighting of things.

    Heidegger spoke of mood, or attunement, as something fundamental in our relationship with the world. Before we interpret life rationally, we are already thrown into it in a certain way. We do not meet the world neutrally; we meet it tired, hopeful, anxious, light, irritated, melancholic. And this changes everything. A simple email can feel like a threat. A banal conversation can become unbearable. A small task can take on the size of a mountain. It is not that reality has completely changed. It is that the way we are inside it has changed.

    That is why certain days seem more difficult to live than others. There are days when existence requires basic maintenance: getting up, replying, eating, working, pretending to possess a minimum degree of normality. Days when life is not exactly dramatic, but nor is it fluid. It catches. Everything seems to demand a slightly greater effort. The body is slow. The mind drags its feet. The world keeps functioning, indifferent, but we fail to keep pace.

    Camus might recognise in this a small everyday absurdity. Not the grand, theatrical absurd, but the quiet one: waking up and realising that the world demands continuity even when we have no enthusiasm for continuing. The alarm rings. Messages arrive. Shops open. The city moves. And we, sometimes, are internally living under a different weather — one that does not appear in any forecast.

    There is a discreet cruelty in this: the world does not pause because our mood has fallen. But there is also a kind of consolation. If mood changes with weather, light, body, sleep, then perhaps it is not an absolute sentence. What we feel on a difficult day is not necessarily the final truth about life. Sometimes it is only life seen beneath a particularly heavy sky.

    Nietzsche, who distrusted great abstract truths, might have liked this idea. Many of our most serious philosophical conclusions may be born from very concrete things: bad digestion, tiredness, loneliness, too much winter, too little movement. Sometimes we think we have discovered a terrible truth about existence, when perhaps we simply need to sleep better, walk a little, open a window, or wait for the weather to turn.

    This does not diminish pain. On the contrary, it makes it more human. Not every sadness needs to be immediately turned into a diagnosis, a concept, or a destiny. Some sadnesses are meteorological. Others are older, and merely find, on certain days, the right atmosphere in which to return. There are feelings that live inside us like furniture covered with sheets. A change in the light is enough to remind us that they are still there.

    Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body helps us understand this. We do not have a body as one has an object. We are a body. It is through the body that the world reaches us. The humidity in the air, excessive heat, lack of sunlight, cold in the shoulders, atmospheric pressure, the smell of rain on the pavement — none of this is merely scenery. It is experience. Thought does not take place in a white, isolated room. It takes place inside skin.

    Perhaps that is why some days ask for less ambition. They are not days for great decisions, great conclusions, or grand interpretations of the meaning of life. They are days to get through. And getting through, sometimes, is already a dignified form of philosophy. There is a humble wisdom in recognising: today, I am not seeing clearly. Today, the light is bad. Today, my body is more vulnerable to the world.

    Philosophy often seeks clarity, but life is full of atmospheres. We do not always know whether we are sad because of something, someone, the past, the future, the rain, Sunday, lack of sunlight, or simply because existence has its own shifts in pressure. Perhaps the answer does not need to be so precise. Perhaps it is enough to admit that we are porous creatures. The world touches us all the time.

    And if there are days when living feels more difficult, that does not mean every day will have the same weight. Mood passes, even when it passes slowly. The sky changes, even when it takes its time. Light returns from another angle. Sometimes, without anything truly being solved, we wake up a little less crushed. Life remains the same, but we are no longer standing in exactly the same place inside it.

    In the end, perhaps this is it: we are not only those who think about life. We are also those who feel it under a particular climate. There are days when the world seems to receive us badly. There are others when it opens a small gap. And until we are able to transform the whole of life, perhaps we can begin by accepting that some days do not need to be conquered with greatness. Some days only need to be lived with enough tenderness for us to reach the next one.

    And in the meantime, I listen to music whilst driving and watch the raindrops hitting the windscreen.

  • Reflections of a skyline

    There’s a particular kind of silence that settles in small towns after midnight — the sort that feels less like absence and more like a held breath. In the North, where streets narrow into memory and memory into habit, he walked without direction, though he would later insist he knew exactly where he was going.

    He had said cariad once without thinking. It slipped out, unguarded, somewhere between a half-finished pint and a confession he didn’t yet understand he was making. The word lingered after, as certain words do — not for what they mean, but for what they reveal about the speaker. It is one thing to love, quite another to admit it in a language that feels inherited rather than chosen.

    He told himself it had been incidental. A linguistic accident. Yet he repeated it in his head now, testing its edges like a loose tooth: cariad. Not quite love, not quite darling, something denser, less willing to dissolve into the casualness of modern speech. A word that resisted the disposability of feeling.

    The town offered no answers. Only familiar façades, brickwork worn into quiet resignation, pub windows dimming one by one. He paused outside one — the same one, of course, it was always the same one — and watched his reflection hesitate in the glass. There is a peculiar estrangement in seeing oneself as a figure among objects, as though one’s interiority were merely an aesthetic choice imposed upon an otherwise indifferent world.

    He wondered, not for the first time, whether love is less an emotion and more a structure — a way of organising perception. To call someone cariad is to rearrange the hierarchy of the visible: suddenly, they occupy the centre, and everything else recedes into a kind of functional irrelevance. The problem, of course, is that such structures are rarely symmetrical. One inhabits the architecture alone.

    She had not replied. Not then, not since. The absence of response had grown, over time, into a presence of its own — something almost tactile, like humidity before a storm. He found himself narrating her silence, assigning it motives, depths, complexities that might justify its persistence. It is easier, he thought, to believe in the opacity of another than in one’s own misreading.

    A group passed him, laughing too loudly for the hour. He envied them briefly, not for their joy — which seemed rehearsed — but for their apparent immunity to reflection. There is a violence, he realised, in thinking too much about feeling; it dissects what ought perhaps to remain whole. Yet he could not help himself. Thought had become his only reliable companion.

    By the time he reached the end of the street, he had almost convinced himself that the word had meant nothing. That it had been an echo of something cultural, a borrowed intimacy, devoid of genuine commitment. But even as he constructed this argument, he felt its inadequacy. Language does not betray us so easily; it exposes us.

    He stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp. The light stuttered, briefly illuminating then withdrawing, as though undecided about its own purpose. In that intermittent glow, he understood—not suddenly, but with the slow clarity of something long resisted—that what unsettled him was not her silence, but the irreversibility of having spoken.

    To name is to fix, at least partially, the fluidity of experience. Once uttered, cariad could not be taken back into the realm of ambiguity. It existed now, independent of intention, lodged somewhere between them, whether or not she chose to acknowledge it.

    He stood there for a moment longer, listening to the faint hum of the town recalibrating itself for morning. Then he turned, not towards home exactly, but away from where he had been.

    It seemed, in the end, that love was not defined by reciprocity, nor even by endurance, but by the quiet, irrevocable act of having meant something — once — without the possibility of revision.

  • Love as an imposed fate

    And other philosophical abstractions

    All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour  
(Paris Paloma, Labour)

    The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a long narrative about human desire; but also, silently, as the history of inequality. In almost every era, love appears as a universal experience, although it is experienced in profoundly different ways. For men, it appears as one dimension among others: an occupation of existence. For women, it often becomes the very meaning of life. This difference does not arise from the feeling itself, but from the way culture has distributed freedom, time, and identity between the sexes.

    In ancient times, love was already thought of from a male perspective. In Plato, eros leads the soul beyond the body, in an ascent towards beauty. The one who loves moves, seeks, overcomes. Love is a path, not a destination; an impulse that accompanies a life dedicated to philosophy, politics, action. Even when love takes centre stage, it does not devour the subject who loves. The lover remains focused on the world. When women appear, they occupy above all the place of symbolic objects: something that inspires, rarely something that thinks. From early on, therefore, love is structured as an active experience on the one hand and a contemplated presence on the other.

    Centuries later, Christianity transforms love into devotion, but maintains the asymmetry. The feminine ideal becomes linked to care, purity, dedication. While men are divided between God, war, work, and thought, women are drawn to the intimate sphere, to bonds, to fidelity. Love becomes their central virtue. The distribution is already beginning to take shape: he loves, but he also builds; she loves and, through this, she exists. The distance between loving and being loved already heralds an asymmetry that would continue for centuries.

    Modernity shifts love to the inner self. With the birth of Romanticism, this difference reaches its most delicate point. Love ceases to be merely a moral or spiritual issue and becomes a promise of completeness. Passion becomes the great drama of modern subjectivity. However, it is not distributed equally: for men, love appears as an intense episode among other projects: career, work, adventure, social recognition. For women, the same love is presented as the final destination, as the place where their identity finds fulfilment. Marriage, home and intimacy become the territory where she must accomplish what he can temporarily abandon. The home becomes the setting where love must prove its truth, and this setting has a gender.

    This is where the thesis becomes visible: men are educated to have a life in which love fits; women, to have a life that fits within love.

    Nietzsche, in criticising the romantic ideal, reveals something essential. For him, absolute passions can threaten the autonomy of the individual. The creative subject needs to keep his distance, to preserve his own strength. Although he does not formulate a feminist critique, his distrust of totalising love shows that the risk of fusion is to lose one’s own self. What Nietzsche describes as an existential danger becomes, for many women, a socially expected condition: to love until one disappears. Love, then, loses its innocence. It is no longer redemption; it is tension. Your critique opens up space to see that love is not necessarily liberating — it can also be a field of power.

    Simone de Beauvoir accurately names this historical difference. In The Second Sex, she shows that men were constituted as subjects: those who act, work, create, move towards the world; while women were taught to seek recognition in the gaze of others. When love presents itself, therefore, it occupies different places. For him, love is one occupation among many. He can love deeply and still preserve a defined identity outside the relationship. For her, love often becomes an absolute project: the relationship ceases to be part of life and becomes the axis that organises all other parts.

    Beauvoir describes this movement with almost painful clarity. A woman in love tends to transform the man into meaning, into a measure of value, into a justification for her own existence. She invests totality where he invests partiality. He loves without abandoning his world; she abandons her world to love. The imbalance is not in the intensity of the feeling, but in the structure that defines what each can lose.

    Love, thus, ceases to be merely a sentimental theme and becomes a political problem. Beauvoir does not claim that women love more; she claims that they have been taught to exist through love. The loving union, so celebrated by romantic tradition, proves to be a trap when it requires one of the two to disappear in order for the couple to exist. To love, in these terms, is to lose oneself.

    Psychoanalysis helps to understand the depth of this phenomenon. To love is to seek recognition, to desire to be chosen. But when an entire subjectivity is built around this choice, love becomes a permanent risk of annulment. The woman not only loves the other: she loves the possibility of existing through him. The man, on the contrary, usually loves from a place that is already socially secure; he does not need to put everything at stake to be recognised.

    Freud and, later, Lacan describe love as an attempt to fill a structural void. The beloved is invested with idealizations that no human being can sustain. To love is also to project, to desire recognition, to negotiate one’s own incompleteness. Love is no longer destiny or virtue: it is the movement of desire, always unstable.

    Contemporary feminist philosophy insists that this difference is not natural. It is taught, repeated, transmitted as if it were inevitable. Boys learn that love is one dimension of life; girls learn that it is the very story of life. One moves on even when he loves; the other is encouraged to stay, wait, sustain. Thus, love becomes an occupation for him and a vocation for her.

    Bell hooks asks why love has been associated with female sacrifice and proposes thinking of it as an ethical practice, not as submission. Judith Butler shows that romantic roles are performative — repeated until they seem natural. Love ceases to be an essence and becomes a learned social language. If it was possible to teach women to live for love, perhaps it is possible to learn to love in another way.

    Perhaps the most delicate point of this thesis is to admit that the problem is not love itself, but the inequality of freedom surrounding it. When a person has multiple projects, love can be experienced as a choice. When one’s entire identity is channelled into the bond, love becomes an ontological necessity. What is an experience for one is a foundation for the other.

    The historical line of philosophy reveals, then, a kind of paradox: the more love was culturally idealised, the more it was associated with the feminine. And the more men were linked to action and creation, the more love became just one of their possible occupations. He can love without disappearing; she was taught to prove her love precisely through disappearance.

    Today, when revisiting this trajectory, we realise that the central question is not whether men and women love differently, but why they were allowed to love in such unequal ways.

    Perhaps the true philosophical transformation occurs when love ceases to be the meaning of life for only one side and becomes an encounter between two existences that already have meaning before they meet.

  • Learning to Walk Without the Map I Drew for Us

    For a long time, loss did not feel like an ending. It felt provisional, temporary, as if life itself were holding its breath with me. I carried the quiet conviction that what had been interrupted could still be resumed — that there was an earlier version of the world waiting patiently for my return, unchanged, intact. I moved through days as though rehearsing, not living, convinced that at some point the doors would reopen and I would simply step back into the life I had imagined continuing.

    That illusion was difficult to surrender because it was gentle. It did not scream or collapse dramatically; it lingered. It asked very little of me except patience. And so I waited. I walked streets whose pavements remembered our conversations. I crossed intersections where I had once pictured our shadows overlapping. The city became a museum of anticipated moments, and I behaved like a devoted visitor, preserving what was never fully real.

    What finally dissolved the illusion was not a single event, but exhaustion. The fatigue of waiting without being met. The dull ache of directing energy towards someone who stood still, not out of certainty but fear. I began to see how much colour had drained from my days — not because the world had dimmed, but because I had narrowed my gaze to a single, unresponsive point.

    Letting go was not heroic. It was quiet and almost accidental. One day I stopped imagining explanations. Another day I stopped checking. Then, without ceremony, I stopped arranging my life around a possibility that refused to choose me.

    The streets changed after that. Or perhaps I did. The same routes began to show details I had overlooked: the uneven rhythm of footsteps at rush hour, the sudden brightness of shop windows at night, the way the city breathes differently when you are no longer waiting for someone to arrive beside you. I had to relearn colour — not as nostalgia, but as presence. What once felt washed out by expectation regained texture once I released the future I had been postponing myself for.

    I started listening to new music, not because I needed novelty, but because my ears were finally open. Sounds no longer had to compete with imagined conversations. I walked unfamiliar streets without assigning them symbolic weight. Cafés were just cafés. Parks were simply places to sit and exist. There was relief in this ordinariness, in allowing spaces to belong to themselves again.

    I finally ended that wait that arose purely from my hope of seeing you. Now I hope I never run into you again, because I have finally accepted that all our business is finished. I don’t want to see you. Not in the square, not on the street, not at the market. I no longer waste my time dreaming of meeting your gaze among the lights of dusk.

    I realised how deeply being ignored had shaped my perception. How the absence of response had trained me to doubt my own vividness. Now, without that constant background noise of waiting, things appeared sharper. Light reflected differently. Words landed more clearly. I did not feel louder or more urgent — only more real.

    Melancholy remains, but it has changed its posture. It no longer pulls me backwards; it stands beside me, observant, almost companionable. It reminds me of what I once hoped for, without demanding that I rebuild it. The past is no longer a destination. It is a reference point, useful only insofar as it clarifies what I will not repeat.

    I am beginning again, not dramatically, not triumphantly, but honestly. I walk forward without rehearsing reunions that will never happen. I make room for memories that have not yet been lived. And in this unclaimed space — free of expectation, free of silence imposed by another — I feel something steady and unmistakable.

    Not the joy of return, but the quieter happiness of arrival.

    
We take a chance from time to time
And put our necks out on the line
And you have broken every promise that we made
And I have loved you anyway

Took a fine time to leave me hangin' out to dry
Understand now I'm grieving
So don't you waste my time
Cause you have taken
All the wind out from my sails
And I have loved you just the same

We finally find this
Then you're gone
Been chasing rainbows all along
And you have cursed me
When there's no one left to blame
And I have loved you just the same
And you have broken every single fucking rule
And I have loved you like a fool

  • Between the Last Day and the Next Breath

    The year closes not with a sound but with a thinning, like breath against cold glass. Days gather themselves into corners, into receipts and wilted calendars, into the residue of things once said and not answered. Time has grown porous. It seeps through me. I find it everywhere: in the pause between steps, in the small ache behind the eyes, in the way afternoon light hesitates before it abandons the room.

    I have been counting without numbers. Not the achievements, nor the griefs — those insist on their own arithmetic — but the intervals. The spaces where nothing happened and yet something was decided. A year, I discover, is not a line but a tide that recedes unevenly, leaving behind objects that were never meant to be kept. A sentence begun and never finished. A name that no longer fits in the mouth. The memory of a laugh that seems to belong to someone else.

    There is a peculiar intimacy to endings. They draw the world close, compress it. Streets become narrower; voices carry further. I walk through December as though through a house after a party — cups abandoned, a faint sweetness in the air, the sense that joy was here recently and has gone somewhere without explanation. What remains is not sadness exactly, but a listening. A waiting for the walls to speak.

    Sometimes I think of the self I was in January, so certain, so loosely assembled. She believed in progress, in the gentle curve of improvement. Now she feels like a letter returned to sender, unopened. The year has written on me anyway: in tiredness, in a new caution of the heart, in the way I no longer rush to fill silences. Silence, I have learned, is not empty. It is crowded with what we cannot make useful.

    At night, the mind loosens its grip. Thoughts drift like unmoored boats. There are moments when the question rises — quiet, almost polite — about endurance, about whether the labour of being is an obligation or a choice renewed each morning. I do not answer it. I let it hover, because answers are heavy things and I am already carrying enough.

    Yet there are small resistances. The way tea warms the hands. The stubborn persistence of dawn. A sentence that arrives intact, asking to be written. These are not reasons, perhaps, but they are presences. They insist without arguing.

    The year stands at the threshold now, shoes on, keys in hand. I watch it go with a feeling I cannot name — part relief, part mourning, part indifference sharpened into attention. What comes next is unwritten. Whether that is mercy or threat depends on how one looks at the blank page.

    I close the window. The night remains. So does the possibility that tomorrow will ask again, and that I will answer — not with certainty, but with another step into the room, another breath taken without promise, without refusal.