かこのひかり
ちのあじ
いきるためのうた
light of the past / taste of blood / a song for living
I was sitting in a bar that smelled like damp wood and old regrets. The kind of place where the clock on the wall stopped in 1994 and no one felt the need to fix it. I was thinking about a man named Elias.
He was a retired longshoreman I met years ago when I was drifting through a coastal town. His skin was the color of a tea-stained map, and his knuckles were swollen, resembling the smooth, grey stones you find at the bottom of a cold river.
Elias didn’t give me advice. He gave me presence. Once, we sat for three hours on a pier watching the tide come in. He didn’t say a word until the sun hit the horizon. Then he looked at me and said, “The world doesn’t owe you a meaning. You have to carve it out of the silence.”
That stayed with me. It was a raw, jagged piece of truth that I didn’t know what to do with until much later.
The Library of Broken Things
I’ve come to realize that we are all walking museums of everyone we’ve ever encountered. But it’s not just the mentors. It’s the strangers who left scars.
I think of a story I once read about a man whose father was a “functional” alcoholic. Every night, the father would come home and meticulously sharpen his kitchen knives for an hour. He never used them for violence; he just sharpened them until they could slice through a thought. The son lived in a state of high-frequency terror, a constant, vibrating fear.
But years later, that son became a world-class surgeon. He realized that the trauma had gifted him a hyper-awareness of precision. His father’s sickness had, through some dark alchemy, become the son’s saving grace.
Every person is a lesson, but sometimes the lesson is wrapped in barbed wire.
The Specificity of Influence
If you look closely enough, everyone has a “specific knowledge” they are desperate to offload.
- I think of the woman who lost her child and now grows the most beautiful roses in the county. She taught me that grief is just love with no place to go. She channeled that massive, destructive energy into the soil. She turned a void into a bloom.
- I think of the man who spent ten years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. When he got out, he didn’t seek revenge. He just sat in the park and watched the pigeons. He told me, “Anger is a luxury I can no longer afford. It takes up too much space where the sun should be.”
These people are my teachers. They taught me that leverage isn’t just about money; it’s about the emotional capacity to stay soft when the world tries to sandpaper you into a stone.
The Human Compound Interest
We are taught to avoid the “toxic,” to delete the “negative.” But if you are playing the long game of the soul, you realize that even the betrayals are compounding assets.
I read about a woman who was cheated on after twenty years of marriage. She felt like a hollowed-out shell. But in the vacuum of that loss, she discovered a version of herself that didn’t need external validation to exist. She found a “sovereignty” she never would have sought if she had stayed comfortable.
True wealth is the ability to walk away from any table where respect is no longer being served. You only learn that by sitting at the wrong tables first.
The Carpenter’s Ghost
Back in the bar, I looked at my hands. They aren’t as scarred as Elias’s, but they carry the weight of everyone I’ve touched.
I am a mosaic. I am a Frankenstein’s monster of other people’s habits, warnings, and quiet acts of bravery. I have the stubbornness of my mother, the silence of that longshoreman, and the precision of a man I only met once in a dream.
The mindset of growth isn’t about being “positive” in a shallow, sunny way. It’s about being clinical. It’s about looking at a heart-breaking experience and asking: What is the nutrient here? What can I eat from this fire to grow stronger?
I don’t want to live a life that is “unspoiled.” I want to be a used-up, well-read book, with notes scribbled in the margins by everyone I’ve ever loved or hated.
The door of the bar opened. A stranger walked in, shivering from the rain. They sat down and ordered a drink, looking at the floor with a heavy, preoccupied gaze.
I didn’t turn away. I leaned in. I waited. Because everyone is a book, and I am still learning how to read.
life 
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