Where They Still Breathe
-a story of unfinished goodbyes
I used to think they were mad.
It was easy, really. Comfortable.
You see someone talking to empty air, laughing without reason, holding conversations with no one… and your mind quickly labels it. “Broken.” “Gone.” “Not normal.” It saves time. It saves effort.
And most importantly, it saves you from asking deeper questions.
There was a man near my house. Every morning he would sit outside and talk to someone who wasn’t there. At least, that’s what I believed. He would smile, pause as if listening, then reply. Sometimes he even laughed… not loudly, not awkwardly, but genuinely. The kind of laugh you rarely hear anymore.
I remember thinking, how strange… how empty his world must be.
Now I think… maybe it wasn’t empty at all.
I started noticing others.
A woman at the bus stop who whispered to herself, nodding gently as if someone was standing beside her. A boy in the park playing, throwing a ball, waiting… and then catching it back from nothing. An old man arguing angrily with thin air, as if someone had truly wronged him.
At first, it all looked random.
Disconnected.
Like shattered pieces of different minds.
But the more I watched, the more something felt… consistent. They weren’t confused.
They weren’t searching.
They were responding.
One evening, I sat near that man.
He didn’t notice me at first. Or maybe he did, and I just wasn’t part of his world.
“Don’t worry,” he said softly, looking beside him, “he’ll understand someday.”
I don’t know why, but that line stayed with me.
He’ll understand someday.
Who was “he”?
And what was there to understand?
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
For the first time, I stopped asking what is wrong with them and started asking something far more uncomfortable:
What if nothing is wrong?
We say time never stops.
It moves forward, indifferent, unforgiving. It takes everything eventually… people, moments, love… and leaves behind memories as proof that something once existed.
That’s what we believe.
That’s what we accept.
But what if some people refuse to accept it?
What if, at the exact moment the world tried to take everything from them… they simply didn’t let it?
Maybe they didn’t lose their loved ones.
Maybe they froze them.
Held them in a place where time does not reach.
A quiet corner of the mind where seconds do not pass, where endings are not allowed to happen.
Where a goodbye is never completed.
We call them mad because they don’t live in our reality.
But what is this reality, really?
A place where people smile without meaning it. Where conversations are rehearsed.
Where pain is hidden, not healed. Where loneliness exists even in crowded rooms.
We stay here… not because it’s perfect, but because it’s shared.
Because leaving it alone would make us the outsider.
But them? They left. Or maybe… they were pushed. By loss. By trauma. By something too heavy for this world to hold. And instead of breaking… they built.
The man I used to watch… he didn’t lose his family. He refused to let them go.
Perhaps he is living in a moment that never ended.
A moment where his family is still there. Still breathing. Still smiling.
While we moved forward… he stayed.
And maybe that’s why his laughter feels different.
Because ours is tied to time. It fades. It breaks. It changes. His doesn’t. It comes from a place untouched by loss.
The woman at the bus stop… she wasn’t whispering nonsense. She was continuing a conversation that reality had interrupted. The boy in the park… he wasn’t playing alone.
He was playing in a world where someone still throws the ball back.
And here’s what unsettled me the most:
They were… happy.
Not always. Not perfectly.
But when they smiled, it wasn’t forced.
When they laughed, it wasn’t to fill silence. It was real.
More real than anything I had felt in a long time.
We call them mad because they see things that aren’t there.
But maybe… they feel things that are there, just not for us.
There’s an irony I can’t ignore anymore.
Some people spend their whole lives trying to detach from the world. They meditate, isolate, abandon desires… all to reach a place beyond pain, beyond attachment.
And yet, the ones we call mad… they are already there.
Not by choice.
But completely.
I used to think they had lost everything.
Now I think… they couldn’t afford to.
So they created a world where nothing is lost.
Where love doesn’t end. Where absence doesn’t exist. Where pain is rewritten.
And us?
We stayed.
In a world where everything ends.
And we call that sanity.
Sometimes I sit near that man again. He still talks. Still listens. Still smiles.
I don’t interrupt anymore.
I just watch.
And for the first time in my life…
I’m not entirely sure which one of us is living in the real world.