Forgive me

I fell. Not with a cry, nor with glory, but as a cross falls from the chest of one who forgot how to believe. I fell on a Wednesday, when the rain smelled of raw fish, and the hurried world drew its umbrellas like mantles of indifference. No one saw me. They were busy with their bicycles, with their phones, with their eyes, which no longer weep, but only check notifications. I fell on a bench where an old Moroccan woman was sitting, murmuring something in Arabic. Maybe a prayer. Maybe a longing. Maybe just hunger. She handed me a mandarin and said: “Allah ziet alles.” I felt ashamed. I fell in front of a shop window filled with blind mannequins. In them, I saw all my dreams, dressed beautifully, but hollow within. At the Van Gogh Museum, a little girl asked: “Daddy, why did he paint stars on such sad nights?” And I thought: we all paint… only some of us have no colors, only ashes. I fell slowly, without a sound, like an unfinished verse written in a hotel room where only the cold can be heard. And no one asked, “What’s wrong with you?” for no one asks anymore. They just pass by, faces turned toward the future, souls wrapped in plastic. But maybe I wasn’t lost. Maybe I just saw myself for the first time in the dirty mirror of an Amsterdam canal, where the sky falls every morning, and no one asks it why.