Published by: Zenie Lynn Caguing
Date Published: October 18, 2025
Time Published: 10:36 am
Category: Prose
Theme: One’s longing for calmness and peace.
I have been thinking of a place that resides between sorrow and contentment. It is a city without a map, quiet, threaded through the loud machinery of living. I want to go there. I want to dance at its invisible border and take the slow, gentle step that separates wanting from being.
I imagine it to exist in the silence between heartbeats, the glorious quiet where clocks forget to tick and grief loosens its grip. In the silence where life unhooks its claws from my ribs and spares my flesh, pain becomes nothing more than just a rumor. Breath is nothing heavier than a piece of paper, drifting and graceful. Time is soft and forgiving, like a linen sweater folded neatly in a closet.
Perhaps I shall find it in a dream: a landscape constructed from half-remembered lullabies, where air tastes of light rain. Perhaps it will appear as a doorway at the edge of a worn path—the kind of door that needs no grandeur, only a small willingness to step through. There, the sky will not demand of me explanations; clouds will not ask of me anything. They will pass with the nonchalance of strangers.
In that place, if it ever exists, the world is generous in small ways. Meadows lay open; flowers will be thrown at my wake, not in mourning but in reckless celebration. Regrets are polite things that step aside, and resentment fades into the pale hue of afternoons. Even my longings feel less like hunger and more like a delicate scene I can wander without a fear of getting lost.
And if the calm I crave is, quietly, the calm that comes after the last ledger is closed—if the city between sorrow and contentment is the narrow city beyond our maps—let it be gentle. Let it be like the feeling of unbuttoning a coat after a busy day, the last exhale without duties following.
If such a place does not exist in any sense other than my head invents, then let me drift towards that seam and live there. If it only resides between longing and fantasy, let me make a home out of it. Let me dwell in the poetry of it, and in that dwelling learn that sometimes the most sincere refuge is the one we imagine to soften the thought of leaving.
