In search of the miraculous

In Search of the Miraculous | Bas Jan Ader, 1975.

I think I’m metaphysically burning.

It begins somewhere deep inside me—an ache nested in my stomach, not quite physical, but cruelly persistent. It gnaws and gnaws, hollowing me out like a fire that never wants to be seen, only felt.

There is something sacred here, I know it.

A meaning. A gravity to existence. Love. Faith. The stubborn glimmer of hope. But these truths, the ones you read about in poetry and pretend to believe when the sun hits just right—they never really arrive for me. They stand at the threshold but never knock.

I think, and I think deeply. And all I receive in return is more ache. No clarity, only suffering dressed in philosophical rags. I try to connect to you, to God, to the past—but everything feels two inches above the skin, a life lived under a layer of wax. I can’t feel your love anymore, nor your forgiveness. I can’t even feel my own.

I am just floating matter, disintegrating.

Dust with a name, running out of time.

I am trying—endlessly trying—to find the sea. To reach the source. To understand. To remember. Life has become a prolonged exercise in trying: trying to feel less, trying to feel more, trying to make it not feel like this.

It has always been a state of running. Running toward a home that doesn’t exist anymore. Toward the idea of family, now fragmented. Toward the echo of old friendships that only live in the way light used to fall in certain rooms.

I am a wanderer—an observer, and a ghost in my narrative. There is no home, only a trail of unfinished chapters and dreams folded too tenderly to discard. The beautiful moments slip through like light on water—brief, aching, and destined to vanish into the cracked vaults of my memory, where nothing remains intact.

My memory floats untethered.

I cannot recall specifics, and yet I remember everything.

I remember the taste of tears—the metallic kind that comes with regret.

I remember the heartache that rearranged my chest.

The fever dreams, where love showed up in the wrong forms.

There was no golden summer, just static. Just the in-between.

And now I live there, in the in-between. Unable to go forward, unable to return. I want to reach back, to hold your face, to kiss the softness of forgiveness—but the past is a ghost I cannot touch. The future is a blur I cannot trust.

I stay here, suspended in a moment that refuses to end. Around me, the world rushes forward—spinning, evolving, decaying. And I—fragile, foolish—search the spaces between seconds for some flicker of the miraculous, as if hope might still be hiding there.

Maybe that’s all I’ve ever done. Looked for the miraculous in a world that only offers brief glimpses of it before turning away.

And maybe that’s the tragedy.

Or maybe, just maybe, that’s the art.