I stand there, solo, pale as a soldier in defeat, though I feel as big as the world. But I’m choking with the loneliness I breathe in the air. I see a part of me close by, but I fear embracing it so as not to give loneliness all the space there is, and die in my own worthlessness, after being on top of the world.

Before me, I see that I’m on a stage in a theatre where no one is watching. And my keys, I find no one to touch them anyway. So I remain there, hoping that a strong wave of wind would move my keys, or my pedals, and a sound would break out of me and people would wish they’d been the audience in the hall, whose audience is sheer emptiness.

But I’ve lived in this old, desolate building for so long I can’t remember how people looked or how it felt to have fingers touch my soul or feet push passionately against those magical pedals of mine.

I’ve been here for so long I’ve borne witness to the breaking and cracking of the walls, I’ve seen lights being shut forever, and I’ve seen the void and emptiness fill the room until there was but a crowd of nothingness.

I wish I had a span of my life instead of this excruciating immortality, because I, despite every death I’ve witnessed and every breath I’ve seen be taken away forever, still manage to bring out the life in me and stand still, not as a defeated soldier but as the last man standing, who awaits nothing but death, and the mysterious longing for the afterlife, the mortality.

I, whose keys have grown obsolete since God knows when, still with the eagerness to die, yearn for the last two hands that would play my death piece, so that I can die there knowing I left to the world the most abysmal music of loss, avenging for the loneliness it has put me through. To die with relief, embracing a solo trip to a new audience.

He told me that the world was so eager to see my dreams crushed and thrown into the river with all the crushed dreams of those we pass by every day, and that the world couldn’t care less if I came up with a beautiful poem or a mesmerising piece of memoir or prose that tells the deepest stories in our lives. All the world needed was another prematurely dead ambition killed right by the words, “I can’t do it.”

I often get lost between the “can’t” and the “won’t,” between believing so much in an ordinary, mediocre dream that the extraordinary becomes impossible in a split of a second. Or, is it a decade? Do we really nurture our dreams or do we allow them to fade with time, if all that we do is let go of one dream after another, day in day out, as if we’re detoxing, and as though the older we grow the less we’re allowed to dream? I’m not sure, because some of us, like myself, get so carried away by the dreams of those around them, watching their dreams come true and doing nothing to give life to their own dreams. It’s like some people are born in this world just to clap for and applaud the dreams of those living around them that they forget, truly forget, they, too, can dream.

He told me this and paused, as if getting ready for the gist, and then went on saying that “if you don’t want to give the world something, give yourself the pleasure of writing, of telling so many people how much you can relate to their pain, their feelings, their fights, and their imprisoned words.” And then he cursed the world, and I don’t need to tell you how he cursed it, because we all do it the same way.

But he should have cursed the world first, before he said the words “dreams crushed,” because how crueller can a world be, crushing the one thing we live for? And why exactly is it eager to see such destruction?

I don’t remember the first time I felt crushed, and I’m not sure your realisation to a crushed dream is instant. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, but slowly and painfully, until the whole f**king world sees it, as if you needed any attention. Then, you curl yourself in bed, sleep for as many hours as there is in a day, to forget about the world and try to pull yourself together to fight another fight, praying that the world has lost its enthusiasm to see another destruction.

And then he told me that every writer writes for one reader in his head, a reader that could as well be nonexistent, but, like musical notes not knowing who will play them next, a book doesn’t know whose eyes will fall in love with it tomorrow, and neither does a writer.

We write because words are the colours to an artist’s painting, the musical symbols to a pianist’s note, the dance floor to a ballerina, and the hat to a magician. Let us fold the world up in our sleep so that we can crush it with our dreams when we wake up.

And, finally, he told me, “the world can’t crush you if you have the words.”