A possible extract from the autobiography written by my future old self

"(...) I had been warned early against all joys.
Especially the intense ones; or the deep ones which so closely resembled happiness
So I let myself yearn for them, recognizing some virtues in that
but I didn't let myself have them.

This had been of course pure, unadulterated cowardice and vanity on my part
but I remember deluding myself into calling it "lucidity"
-How presomptuous of me

I had passed through my life as a ghost
I had been the woman on tip-toe someone
- a Liberian peace activist and Nobel Prize winner called Leymah Gbowee -
had warned people not to be
the poetry of ether - a waste of air.

- What insanity, not to be present in one's own life
in one's society
in hope the losing-all - the dying - would go more smoothly.(...)"

I'll prove my future old self wrong!, I thought as I reread these lines
because in writing an autobiography - which I would do -
a great synthesis of all I had been and all I ever encountered,
I would bring sense to it; the magic of narratives; materiality.

I would call it: life of a ghost
or regrets
or a lifetime of looking through the glass window

In doing so I would be putting myself out there and it all
wouldn't have been in vain, all these many years,
this breath.

I would finally leave footprints
that would outlast me