From the series: Kranker Stadtmensch, taken with Canon 500D, 2025. // There are places that cannot nourish us. The earth beneath our feet has forgotten how to yield, hardened into stone, while above us concrete arches counterfeit the blue cathedral of the sky. Our eyes we lift, longing for heaven, and meet only ceilings.
A mature man may learn to keep the world from pressing its weight against his ribs. Time hardens the bark around the heart. But what of the adolescents? What of their tender bones, their soft wrists still unmarked by labour, their cheeks that blush before they have learned to hide? By what armour shall they defend themselves against a landscape that wounds before it welcomes?
At what hour does a child's longing for distant countries become a promise rather than a flight? When is dreaming the first honest step towards oneself, and when is it merely a gentle way of turning away?
There are burdens we are meant to bear, and others that no soul should mistake for destiny. Yet who among us can always distinguish the two? We reach out to mend what is broken, and sometimes our very kindness unsettles the fragile order that remained. With the purest intentions we overturn the compass itself, until north and south exchange their names, and right and wrong wander the earth like exiles.
Perhaps every life requires a measure of escape, not as cowardice, but as respiration. Perhaps that is why our shoulders were never given wings, only our thoughts. The body is bound to gravity; it tires, it breaks, it returns to dust. But the mind is touched by something that does not belong entirely to time. It wanders where no border can detain it, shares in the vast silence of the cosmos, and dwells nowhere so that it may belong everywhere.
And perhaps that inward country, impossible to occupy and impossible to conquer, is the freest place we shall ever call home.
[text and photograph by Elvin Karda]
