Post by Deimantas S.

We will meet again at a little cafe in the sky… The first word we ever pronounced is just a fossil of breath now. It wasn’t even ours. I’ve left the play whose language I stopped understanding. The world- empty. Nothing moves. Only memories of another time, another life, follow in a solemn procession of one. I’m in a world-forest. Every tree- a thought. Behind it- a story. Real forest. Above: sky, clouds, satellites… And stars. There must be stars there. I can’t see them. Is it day-time? Or am I star-blind? Trees lush with moss, lichen soft as a duvet. Finches sweep across pines, sun-yellow snapdragons, drowsy bees swim in their blossoms. The sonorous jade of the river Till. Pines- emerald. Birches- fragile, as though a light wind would send the leaves falling all at once… But there’s no wind. It’s the restlessness of heart that makes them flutter… Once upon a time, a “horse” of Mind submitted to the “harness” of Word, and voilà! The world was born. Our ancestors believed that only words could dispel the darkness of the mind. Millennia later, we’ve begun entrusting our life stories to machines that never dreamed. And so we are like blind beetles chasing ourselves in ever-decreasing circles, oblivious to the truth that only an Inspired Story can take us to another world, a better world. A string of words, razor-sharp, gliding across the brain, cutting through cultures, tongues, beliefs, making all the nonsense of the world stop… An alphabet allowed us to make meanings inside the silence of the mind. Outside an Inspiring Story, these meanings don’t have the power to turn our mind into a playground of the gods once again. Gods travel incognito today. When they enter and leave the “Hotel du Libre Exchange” they look like us. With regret, they watch as we march backwards into the future, hoping that the machine brain that never dreamed will create an Inspiring Story for us. …I hide in the shadows of an empty Temple at nightfall, remembered only by the flame of a guttering candle lit by some passing pilgrim. There’s an old Lithuanian tale about medicine to be taken if you’re lost at the crossroads. Like all medicines that work, it’s bitter. And the bitterest one is for times when you run out of hope and turn star-blind. I’d love to think we will meet again at a little cafe in the sky in some fabulous Hereafter. Let us make it on a summer evening, after the light rain stops but lingers a little longer in a cloud of tiny diamonds like crumbs shaken off a cobalt-blue tablecloth in the sky. It may feel odd to live in a future where there are no storms or dark skies, where everyone is laughing, spinning with abandon in the orbits of their dreams. I’ll be there, feeling a night breeze rise, listening to how the wind hums a song of will, watching unfamiliar faces smile in the liquid splendor of aquatic night, waiting for ancient hieroglyphs of stars to emerge. And the only disquiet will be a memory of us once feeling disquiet. © Deimantas Steponavicius 2026