The seventh borrowing

"Victor may spend time talking about his favorite subject—himself—to gain the acceptance he wants."

That's from an assessment.

A real one, one of many I've taken over the years, the kind companies pay for so a bot can tell you who you are in a paragraph. I've read a dozen of these reports: Bloomberg's, DISC, personality surveys with names I've already forgotten. Most of them I slide off.

This line, I didn't.

It was as funny as it was true, and I knew exactly where it had begun.

Spring break, my first year of college. The campus emptied out the way campuses do, everyone gone home, the dorms quiet in a way that felt almost rude. I didn't have anywhere better to be, and if I'm honest, I didn't want one.

Bored and restless, I wandered through my roommate's things. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. Just looking. That's when I found it: a small black book, plain enough to disappear into one hand.

Letters to a Young Poet.

I picked it up and didn't put it down. I read it in one sitting, then again, then a third time before Monday came back. I wasn't studying it so much as swallowing it whole: the solitude, the suffering he refused to apologize for, the quiet insistence that before you can write a life, you have to learn to inhabit it. That your inner life isn't an obstacle to living but the place from which living begins.

Kafka would later give me permission to write the strange as though it were ordinary. That was a different theft, for another day. Rilke gave me something stranger still. He gave me permission to become my own subject.

He never used the word immigrant, not once, and yet I've never read a more accurate description of what it feels like to be one. The love and the failure to love well. The solitude you didn't choose and then couldn't leave. The anguish that isn't a symptom of something else, just the weather. Beneath all of it, endurance—not as a virtue but as a fact, the thing you do because the alternative isn't available.