mist lifts off the stone
a bus hums past quiet fields
clouds forget your name
There was a night in Ljubljana, sometime in my twenties, when I worked at a Deadmau5 concert. Not because I was a fan — though I remember the bass shaking the concrete floors like tectonic plates — but because I needed money. The job came through a friend of a friend, a temporary position at a temporary bar, the kind that disappears the moment the music stops.
They gave me a red T-shirt with a logo I never wore again, a stack of vouchers, and pointed me toward the counter. “Pour beer. Pour vodka with Red Bull. Keep the line moving.” That was it. For hours my hands were sticky, my shirt damp, my ears ringing with the kind of beats that flatten thought. The salary was bad, a handful of euros for an entire night, but I told myself the music was payment enough.
Beside me worked another temp. He was thin, serious, older than me by a few years, maybe early thirties. He moved with precision, pouring drinks like he had done it many times before. His English was halting, broken, but enough to pass the hours. He told me he was from China, though he didn’t say why he was in Slovenia. Maybe he was studying. Maybe working. Maybe just drifting. Some people you meet only at the edge of their stories.
We didn’t talk much during the chaos. Just nods, short words, shrugs when the beer ran out. But when the lights dimmed and the crowd began to thin, we finally sat on empty crates behind the bar, sweat cooling on our skin. The hall was filled with silence and the sour smell of spilled alcohol. My ears buzzed with phantom beats. He lit a cigarette, drew in deeply, exhaled.
Then he said something I’ve never forgotten.
“Feelings… they are like weather. Passing through the mind.”
He spoke slowly, choosing words as if testing each before releasing it. His grammar was rough, but the meaning was sharp. He flicked ash onto the floor.
“Now calm. Now restless. Now nothing. But… not me. Just happening. The question is not: how do I feel? The question is: can I see it? Not fight. Not hold.”
I nodded, though I didn’t really understand at the time. We didn’t speak much after that. We cleaned up, stacked the crates, threw out empty cans. By the time we left the hall, the sky was pale with dawn. I never saw him again.
I caught the first bus out of Ljubljana central. It was half empty, rattling along narrow roads toward the outskirts. My body was exhausted, my clothes smelled of sugar and smoke, my mind dulled from the hours of noise. I leaned against the window, watching fields blur by, the mist lifting slowly from the ground.
I was heading to my girlfriend’s place, a small flat in another town. The relationship was young, fragile, beautiful in the way early relationships often are. I thought it might last forever. It didn’t. It ended the way many things end in your twenties — with confusion, silence, and the gradual realization that what feels eternal can be as brief as morning fog.
But I remember that bus ride more than I remember the relationship itself. The empty seats. The slow hum of the engine. The way the sunlight began to edge its way over the horizon. And most of all, the words of that stranger in broken English echoing in my head: feelings are weather.
I carried that phrase with me without knowing why. It surfaced years later, in Basel, when I found myself unable to focus. I sat at my desk, staring at half-written notes, restless without reason. Normally I would push against it — try to distract myself, drink another coffee, force myself into clarity. But that day, for the first time, I didn’t. I simply watched. Restlessness, like a summer storm, came, thundered for a while, and then passed.
Another time, in Shinjuku, I was walking alone at night. Neon flickered in puddles, crowds moved around me in waves, and inside I felt nothing in particular. An emptiness that might have unsettled me before. But I remembered his words. This too is weather. Clouds covering a sky that is still there, even when you can’t see it.
The lesson wasn’t to escape feelings. It wasn’t about pretending calm when there was none. It was about remembering they were not permanent, not defining. Just weather. Passing.
When I think of that stranger now, I realize his English, broken as it was, carried something whole. Maybe he had read it somewhere. Maybe it was his own discovery. Maybe it was just the way he made sense of a difficult life far from home. But it stayed with me more than anything else from those years.
It taught me to stop asking “How do I feel?” as if the answer mattered more than everything else. Feelings shift. They always do. The better question is, “Can I watch them move without clinging or resisting?”
It’s not easy. There are storms that feel endless — grief, anger, longing. But even the longest storm eventually passes. And when it does, you realize the sky was never gone. Only hidden.
That girlfriend in Slovenia? We ended, as expected. But when I think of her now, it isn’t with regret. She was part of that season of my life, as fleeting and necessary as rain. Without her, I wouldn’t have learned what it meant to lose something important and still continue. Without her, I wouldn’t know how to let certain things go without clinging.
The stranger from China? I never saw him again. But I’ve carried his words longer than I carried entire friendships. Maybe that was his role: to pass through, like weather, leaving behind a trace of clarity.
And myself? I am still learning. Some mornings I wake restless, some calm, some empty. But I no longer confuse those states with who I am. They are weather, moving across the mind’s sky.
The bed remains. The sky remains. And I remain, watching.
life 
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