The Life I Drag Around With Me

Written on 03/04/2025
Poetic Outlaws

By: Fernando Pessoa
Photo: Erik Rittenberry

The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

—Fernando Pessoa

I wander aimlessly through the quiet streets, I walk until my body is as tired as my soul, until I feel that familiar pain that revels in being felt, a maternal compassion for oneself, set to music, indefinable.

Oh to sleep, finally to sleep! To find some peace! To be an abstract consciousness of one’s own quiet breathing, with no world, no stars, no soul - a dead sea of emotion reflecting only an absence of stars!…

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life.

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