Where memory and desire entwine, freedom whispers my name.
How many more times will I speak of this?
I echo myself like a worn-out spell, a prayer that never finds an answer.
And still, I am lost.
The other day, I found a photograph of myself on the plane, dressed in uniform. There I was—my face weary, dark circles under my eyes—yet my gaze alive, bright, like embers refusing to die. I looked at that woman and remembered the joy of those days: the satisfaction of standing in the eye of the storm and still finding meaning in every breath that helped sustain another life. That nostalgia for flight still burns quietly inside me.
I miss everything. Even the exhaustion. Even those endless hours when life hung by a thread. I miss the freedom of constant motion—traveling, exploring, arriving in places that felt like the earth’s own secrets—being paid to witness what others could only dream of. I miss the difference I could make between despair and hope.
And, with bare honesty, I also miss the weight of those generous paychecks that now feel like cruel memories. Today, amid my financial struggles, they strike like slaps from the past. That’s the eternal conflict: passion versus necessity.
It terrifies me to think that nothing will ever set me on fire like that again.
I have my business and my clients, but monotony devours me.
The work I do for them leaves me hollow—more secretary than creator, more typist than artist. And though creativity runs through me like a restless river, routine has built dams to contain it.
What I truly love—sewing, painting, writing—will never earn what I once made.
Yet those are the things that give me breath, that remind me I am still alive.
When I feel trapped at my desk, I rise and walk. I seek faces, I let the wind touch me—as if there, in the open air, I might find oxygen. But deep down, I know that time doesn’t make money, and the clock reminds me of the debt in every passing minute.
It’s the same when I hold the needle or the brush: I love the act, even if my hands are clumsy and learning feels slow. Yet those hours don’t pay the bills piling up, threatening to become chains.
I live suspended between passion and need, between the hunger to create and the duty to survive. And in that pendulum swing, life slips away—like water through fingers, like sand in an hourglass that never stops.
This is my battlefield: creative survival, where the soul fights not to go dim.
I am a caged bird that remembers the vastness of the sky.
I know my wings were made to fly, yet I keep striking the same glass—hoping that one day, through persistence alone, the air will belong to me again.
And with every attempt, I still hear the echo of that lost flight—
turning into hope,
turning into inner freedom.
In this lost flight, where flight nostalgia lingers, I search for meaning in creative survival and the fragile balance between passion and necessity. Thank you!
Nel Duarte