Some mornings, I awaken with a phantom ache—not quite pain, not quite nostalgia, but something in between. A silent yearning for the years when reality still shimmered like a hallucination. I remember those first disoriented weeks in Tokyo, when I wandered through the city like a ghost with no language, no bearings, no past. The signs were unreadable hieroglyphs, the announcements echoes from a world I had not yet been invited into.

Back then, I was not a participant in life but a quiet observer of a theater I did not understand. I watched other mammals perform their rituals—board trains, eat, talk, hurry—like creatures tethered to invisible instincts. There was something oddly serene in my disconnection. I didn’t belong, and yet I was free.

At the time, I mistook it for loneliness. But looking back, it was closer to liberation—a brief emancipation from identity, from narrative, from the suffocating logic of who I was supposed to be. It was not happiness in the traditional sense, but it was a lightness, a kind of weightless existence in which nothing was expected of me, and therefore everything was possible.

The memory returns to me softly, like steam creeping beneath a bathroom door—warm, intangible, and slow. That freedom was not in the city or in the experience itself. It was in the unknowing. In being stripped of all definition. I didn’t have to play a role or translate myself to fit into anyone else’s grammar of belonging.

Was it youth that made it glow? Or was it the fact that I hadn’t yet learned how to pretend? There is something unsettling in realizing that the more I learned to assimilate, the less alive I felt. Disconnection, in retrospect, was not the wound—I was the most whole when I was utterly estranged.

Now, even new experiences carry the shadow of their expiration. Everything tastes like déjà vu, even the first time. This is where Schopenhauer’s Will begins to whisper—not as philosophy, but as presence. That blind, insatiable force at the core of all being, pressing inward against the walls of our consciousness. It does not seek joy or peace—it only craves, devours, moves.

The Will is not an enemy, but it is a reminder: nothing will ever be enough. You do not outgrow the Will. You do not pacify it with love, or success, or meaning. You simply recognize it—like a storm that passes through your inner sky—and decide whether you will build shelter or walk into the rain.

And perhaps this is why freedom has always eluded me. Because true freedom is not the absence of constraint—it is the radical act of standing before your desires, fully awake, and neither obeying nor fleeing. It is the space between hunger and surrender.

Don Quijote once told Sancho:

“La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos...”

Freedom is the highest gift—yet it demands everything. It asks you not to escape your condition but to carry it with dignity. To choose your illusions consciously. To err with purpose. To love knowing it will end. To live knowing it is never enough.

Because the ache never leaves. You can taste the world, body by body, country by country, book by book—and still find something missing. That is the inheritance of being human: the wound of incompleteness, the beauty of never being finished.

And maybe—just maybe—real freedom is not to be whole, but to stop needing to be.