Light, Object And That

I do not know when I was born for the first time.

Perhaps it was on the night the first streetlamp was lit.

Perhaps I existed even before that—somewhere between darkness and walls, among objects the light had not yet reached. But if I am to be honest, the first thing I remember from my life is a yellow lamp burning above a deserted street, and myself, for the first time, cast upon the wall of a house.

That night, it was raining.

The lamp cast its faint light across the wet asphalt, and I, together with the wall, lay stretched and trembling across the ground.

I did not know what I was.

I did not know why I had come into existence.

I only saw that everything standing in front of the light brought me into being.

The tree standing beside the street had a long shadow.

The car passing through the alley had a short, moving shadow.

The wall of the house had a still shadow.

And people...

People were shadows that constantly came and went.

I was one of them, too.

A shadow.

All night, I stretched across the wall and changed slightly with every movement of the lamp.

When morning came, the lamp went out.

And I disappeared.

That day, I understood for the first time that my life depended on light.

But not just any light.

The light had to come from somewhere, and something had to stand between it and the light.

That was when I was born.

───

Years passed.

Nights came to my attention more often than days.

Not because I loved the night.

Only because I spent most of my life in it.

Streetlamps, the lit windows of houses, shop windows, and car headlights were each a small sun to me.

Whenever a light came on, I took shape.

Sometimes I was the shadow of a tree.

Sometimes the shadow of an old man slowly crossing the street.

Sometimes the shadow of a child chasing a ball.

Sometimes the shadow of a car speeding past a wall.

Sometimes I was the shadow of a tall building that the streetlamp could not fully contain.

But throughout all those years, I learned one thing:

No shadow at night is as clear as the shadow created beneath the light of the sun.

I did not know that.

Not until the day I saw the sun.

───

That day was different from all the others.

It was a quiet morning.

The street was still empty.

The night lamps were going out one by one.

I was on the wall of a house where I stood at night.

The wind stirred the leaves of the tree beside the street.

The sky was moving away from darkness.

First, it turned gray.

Then blue.

And then, a thin line of light rose from behind the buildings.

At that very moment, something strange happened.

I changed.

I was no longer the pale, trembling shadow of the night.

The new light was stronger than any lamp I had ever seen.

And I...

grew larger.

Clearer.

Darker.

For the first time, I could see myself on the wall.

But what I saw left me astonished.

It was the same wall I knew at night.

But during the day, there were things on it I had never seen before.

Paintings.

Colors.

A small house with a red roof.

A green tree with a brown trunk.

Several blue birds.

Yellow flowers.

A narrow road leading toward distant mountains.

And in one corner of the wall, a child had drawn a picture with a crayon.

A simple image of a person.

With both arms open.

With a wide smile.

With a yellow sun above their head.

I had been on that wall every night.

But I had never seen those paintings.

Because at night, everything became one color.

Darkness had taken the colors from the wall.

And now the sun had returned them to me.

I looked at the wall.

At the colors.

At the tree.

At the house.

At the little person with open arms.

And suddenly, something inside me changed.

For the first time, I asked myself:

“What do I really look like?”

───

That day, I remained on the wall the entire time.

The sun moved, and I moved with it.

In the morning, I was the shadow of a tree.

At noon, the shadow of a building.

In the afternoon, the shadow of a car parked beside the street.

Every time something stood in front of the sun, I took on a new shape.

And this amazed me.

I was not just one thing.

I could be a thousand things.

I could take the shape of tree branches.

I could slide across the roof of a car.

I could climb along the side of a building window.

I could walk beside a person.

And strangest of all, in every one of those forms, I remained myself.

But whenever I reached that wall, something inside me grew calm.

Because the colors were there.

And I had fallen in love with colors.

Not only with the colors.

I had fallen in love with the image of myself I saw among them.

A dark shadow falling across the red house.

Stretching over the green tree.

Passing among the blue birds.

Sliding across the yellow sun.

As if, for the first time, my darkness could also be part of a beautiful picture.

That day, I understood that perhaps darkness is not always the enemy of light.

Sometimes darkness, beside light, becomes another form of beauty.

───

From that day on, mornings took on a different meaning for me.

I no longer waited for night.

I waited for the sun.

Every day, when the first light rose from behind the buildings, I made my way to that same wall.

Of course, “making my way” has a strange meaning for a shadow.

I did not walk.

I moved.

Sometimes across a wall.

Sometimes across the ground.

Sometimes across a windowpane.

Sometimes across the asphalt of the street.

But I always reached that wall.

And it was there.

My shadow.

Or perhaps something I imagined was myself.

I watched it for hours.

As the sun rose, it grew shorter.

When evening came, it stretched out again.

Sometimes the wind shook the tree, and my shape trembled on the wall.

Sometimes cars passed in front of the sun, and I disappeared for a few seconds.

But I returned.

Every day.

Like someone who had an appointment.

Like someone being waited for.

I had fallen in love with the shadow cast upon the wall.

And I did not know how strange that love was.

Until one day, I realized that it could never see the night.

───

Evenings were the hardest part of the day.

The sun slowly descended.

Golden light settled over the buildings.

The shadows grew longer.

I grew longer, too.

But in those moments, something strange happened.

There was a boundary between day and night.

The day had not ended.

The night had not yet begun.

The sky was still slightly bright, but the first streetlamps were coming on.

I found myself between two lights.

The sunlight on one side.

The lamplight on the other.

And for a few minutes, I did not know whose shadow I was.

Sometimes two shadows of me fell across the ground.

One long and pale, created by the sunlight.

The other darker, created by the streetlamp.

For the first time, I understood that I could be two things at once.

The remains of day.

The beginning of night.

But as the darkness deepened, the shadow of the sun disappeared.

And the shadow of the lamp took its place.

That moment was always painful for me.

Because the shadow I loved slowly faded away.

The colors on the wall disappeared.

The red house, the green tree, the blue birds, and the yellow flowers all vanished into the darkness.

And in the end, only a black wall remained.

And me.

Alone.

───

One night, I asked myself:

“Why does it exist only during the day?”

Then I realized I had asked the wrong question.

It always existed.

I was the one who could not see it at night.

Night made everything the same.

The wall.

The paintings.

The tree.

The car.

The building.

And me.

We all became darkness.

But day...

Day revealed differences.

And perhaps that was why I had fallen in love with the day.

Not because of the light.

Because of the things the light allowed me to see.

───

One day, heavy rain fell.

From morning until night.

The clouds had hidden the sun.

The shadows were faint.

I waited all day.

But the sun never came.

That day, I learned what longing meant.

I had once imagined that being a shadow meant not existing.

But that day, I understood that sometimes one can exist and still be unable to see what one loves.

The rain stopped.

Night fell.

The streetlamp came on.

I fell across the wall again.

But the wall was empty.

The paintings were still there, but in the darkness, none of them could be seen.

I looked toward the place where the red house had been.

Toward the place where the green tree stood.

At the blue birds.

And at the little person with open arms.

I could see nothing.

I could see only myself.

Dark.

Colorless.

Alone.

That night, for the first time, I hated myself.

I said to myself:

“Perhaps I am the reason the colors cannot be seen.”

Perhaps my presence on the wall hid the paintings.

Perhaps it would be better if I did not exist.

But then I remembered that during the day, when the sun shone, I fell across those same paintings.

And they looked more beautiful.

So perhaps I was not the problem.

The only problem was that night had come.

───

Days passed.

I lived in anticipation.

Anticipating sunrise.

Anticipating light.

Anticipating that wall.

Until one day, something happened that changed everything.

Workers came to the street.

The old building beside the wall was going to be demolished.

The wall was going to be painted, too.

I did not know what “demolished” meant.

But when the first blow struck the wall, I heard a strange sound.

The painting cracked.

The red house split in half.

The green tree broke apart along the crack in the wall.

One of the blue birds disappeared.

I was terrified.

The sun was shining that day.

I was on the wall.

But for the first time, I was not happy about the light.

Because I could see that something I loved was being destroyed.

The next day, I returned.

The wall was still standing.

But the paintings had grown fainter.

The following day, another part of them was erased.

And the day after that...

The red house was gone.

The green tree was only part of a faded trunk.

And the little person with open arms no longer had a smile.

Part of their face had disappeared beneath a layer of white paint.

I stood on the wall all day.

For the first time, I wanted time to stop.

But time never stops for shadows.

───

A few days later, the wall was completely white.

I arrived.

But there was nothing left.

No house.

No tree.

No birds.

No flowers.

No little person.

Only a white wall.

And my shadow.

I stayed there for a long time.

Motionless.

I stared at the place where there was no longer anything.

I thought perhaps this was what love meant.

Loving something you know will one day disappear.

And still loving it.

Because once, it existed.

───

That evening, for the first time, I was not afraid of nightfall.

The sun slowly descended.

My shadow grew long.

The streetlamp came on.

And I became the shadow of the night again.

But this time, something had changed.

I was no longer searching for that image.

I was no longer waiting for the paintings to return.

I had understood that what I had lost was not merely a colorful wall.

I had seen a part of myself on that wall.

And now I had to learn to know myself without that image.

The night deepened.

I lay across the asphalt.

A car passed beside me.

Its shadow fell across me for a few moments.

Then it moved away.

A tree swayed in the wind.

Its shadow trembled on the ground.

A tall building covered part of the street.

And I understood that all of them were like me.

They all came.

They all changed.

They all depended on light.

But none of them remained the same forever.

───

The next morning, the sun rose again.

I waited.

The light rose from behind the buildings.

First faint.

Then brighter.

And then...

I fell across the white wall again.

For a few seconds, nothing happened.

I was only a shadow.

But then, on the white surface of the wall, I saw my own shape.

This time, there were no paintings.

No house.

No tree.

No birds.

Only me.

And for the first time, I was happy to see myself.

I realized that perhaps I had been mistaken all along.

I had not fallen in love with the shadow on the wall.

I had fallen in love with the moment when I was able to see myself for the first time.

The colors of the painting had only helped me understand that my darkness, too, could exist beside beauty.

And now that the paintings were gone, I still remained.

───

From that day on, I was no longer dependent on a single wall.

Wherever there was light, I was there, too.

Beneath trees.

Beside cars.

Across the walls of buildings.

On the ground.

Beside people crossing the street.

Sometimes I became the shadow of an old man walking slowly.

Sometimes the shadow of a running child.

Sometimes the shadow of a bird passing over the ground.

Sometimes the shadow of a car moving along the road.

Sometimes the shadow of a building stretching across the ground at sunset.

And each time, I saw something new.

I was no longer searching for one particular shape.

I had understood that being a shadow meant changing.

It meant accepting that the shape you have today might not exist tomorrow.

───

But there was still one thing I loved most of all.

The boundary between night and day.

Every evening, I reached that moment.

The sun descended.

The lights came on one by one.

The shadow of day slowly faded.

And the shadow of night was born.

For those few minutes, I was both.

Part of the day.

Part of the night.

Neither completely bright.

Nor completely dark.

And that was when I understood that perhaps no one is only one thing.

No one is always bright.

No one is always dark.

People are like shadows, too.

Sometimes they are seen in the light.

Sometimes they disappear into darkness.

Sometimes they reveal a color of themselves.

Sometimes they are only a vague darkness.

But changing does not mean they are worthless.

It means that light is still moving through their lives.

───

One night, I returned to that same wall.

The streetlamp was on.

The wall was white.

No paintings remained.

I fell across the wall.

But this time, I was not alone.

A tree stood beside the street.

Its shadow fell beside mine on the wall.

A little farther away, the shadow of a car could be seen.

Behind it stood the shadow of a large building.

Each had its own shape.

For a moment, I felt that the entire city had become one enormous painting.

A painting no one had drawn.

And the shadows were its brushes.

When morning came, the sun returned.

Everything changed.

The tree’s shadow shifted.

The car moved.

The building remained standing.

And I changed, too.

But I was no longer afraid of change.

───

Years later, the old wall no longer existed.

A new building had taken its place.

No one remembered those paintings.

Perhaps the child who had drawn them had grown up.

Perhaps they had forgotten the red house.

Perhaps the blue birds no longer meant anything to them.

But I still remembered them.

Because some things are remembered only by shadows.

Things people pass by.

Moments that are brief.

Images that remain on a wall for only a few hours.

And then disappear forever.

One morning, I fell across the wall of the new building.

The sun had just risen.

Golden light spread gently across the city.

I looked at the wall.

It was white.

But in my mind, I saw a red house.

A green tree.

A blue bird.

Several yellow flowers.

And a child with open arms.

I smiled.

If shadows can smile.

───

Now I am no longer afraid of the night.

The night is not my enemy.

The night is simply a time when light reaches me in another form.

When the sun goes away, I do not disappear.

I only change.

Sometimes I remain on a wall.

Sometimes on the ground.

Sometimes beside a lit window.

Sometimes beneath a solitary lamp.

And when morning comes, I take on another shape again.

Perhaps this is what it means to be a shadow.

To know that you will not always be seen.

To understand that sometimes darkness does not hide something from you; it only means you need another time to see it.

I once thought I was alone.

I thought that because the night created me, I belonged to the night.

Then I understood that the sun could create me, too.

And even more beautifully.

More deeply.

More clearly.

And then I understood that none of them owned me.

Not the night.

Not the day.

Not the lamp.

Not the sun.

I am only a shadow.

And perhaps that is where the beauty of a shadow lies:

It never remains the same.

It never stays in one place.

It is never seen forever.

But as long as light exists, it will return.

───

Today, at the very moment when night is about to end, I am cast across a wall.

The streetlamp is still on.

The sun has not yet fully risen.

The sky stands at the boundary between darkness and blue.

I, too, stand between two lights.

The shadow of the lamp is still beside me.

The shadow of the sun slowly approaches.

For a few moments, we are both visible.

Then the lamp goes out.

And the sun rises.

I change.

I grow long.

I grow short.

And once again, I take shape on the wall.

This time, there are no paintings.

No red house.

No blue birds.

Only a white wall.

And me.

But I am no longer searching for anything.

Because now I know that if one day colors are painted on this wall again, I will become part of them.

And if one day all the colors are erased, something of me will still remain.

A shadow.

Born again with every sunrise.

Taking on another shape with every sunset.

Perhaps life is the same.

Sometimes we think that when we lose something, we are finished.

We think that if a wall collapses, if a color is erased, if someone leaves our side, no image of us will remain.

But it is not always so.

Sometimes what disappears is only the image we had created of ourselves.

And behind that image, we are still standing.

Waiting for a new light.

Waiting for morning.

Waiting for the moment when we can see ourselves again.

I am a shadow.

The night hides me.

The day reveals me.

And at the boundary between the two, I have learned that no darkness lasts forever.

Just as no light remains unchanged forever.

But as long as light rises again from somewhere...

A shadow is born again.