A Cahya Legawa's Les pèlerins au-dessus des nuages

There’s a particular quiet that descends when consciousness arrives somewhere it doesn’t belong—not the silence of peace, but the hollow echo of a word spoken in the wrong language.

Consider the mind of someone waking from a coma after months of absence. The world has turned without them. Friends have aged in ways both visible and invisible. The rhythm of life they knew has shifted tempo. They return to find their own memories feel like artifacts from someone else’s excavation. Their soul has been preserved in amber while everything around it continued to evolve, and now they must inhabit a present moment that their deepest self doesn’t recognize. The displacement isn’t in space, but in time—they are a January consciousness living in an August world.

Or think of the immigrant’s specific loneliness, which isn’t simply about missing home. It’s about carrying internal geographies that no longer match the external landscape. The jokes that made sense before fall flat. The gestures that conveyed warmth are misread. The mind becomes a translator working without rest, exhausting itself in the gap between what it intuitively knows and what this new place demands. The soul isn’t homeless—it has a home, but the home is a memory, and you cannot live in memory while your body insists on existing here.

Perhaps the deepest displacement is when the mind feels alien to its own vessel—the person who looks in the mirror and sees a stranger, not because the reflection has changed, but because something essential within has shifted. The old paths of thought feel foreign. Former certainties crumble. What once felt like self now feels like costume.

In these moments, the soul is an exile not from a place, but from belonging itself—the most fundamental homesickness there is.

Commenting 101: “Be kind, and respect each other” // Bersikaplah baik, dan saling menghormati (Indonesian) // Soyez gentils et respectez-vous les uns les autres (French) // Sean amables y respétense mutuamente (Spanish) // 待人友善,互相尊重 (Chinese) // كونوا لطفاء واحترموا بعضكم البعض (Arabic) // Будьте добры и уважайте друг друга (Russian) // Seid freundlich und respektiert einander (German) // 親切にし、お互いを尊重し合いましょう (Japanese) // दयालु बनें, और एक दूसरे का सम्मान करें (Hindi) // Siate gentili e rispettatevi a vicenda (Italian)

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