Ten years…
Ten years drifting.
Suspended. Not quite up there, not fully back down here.
I thought I was setting out on a mission. Truth is, I was pulled in.
Ten years ago, I left familiar ground, weighed down by convictions and lightheartedness.
And ever since, I’ve been orbiting. Around what, exactly?
An idea, a dream, a center that sometimes disappears.
I’ve crossed unstable planets, fleeting stars, burning comets.
Some brushed past me without stopping.
Others left pieces of themselves that I still carry.
How many missed trajectories?
How many light-years lost chasing faint signals, believing that my true north lay in other people’s hearts?
And yet, I was never truly alone.
Each orbit, each detour, each collaboration was a fragment of a greater universe.
The sum of all these human trajectories has traced my own celestial map.
I have loved. I have built. I have destroyed.
At times I was the engine, other times a stowaway in my own life.
And in the gaps left by doubt, I found faces:
Those who held me when I lost my gravity.
Those who urged me to venture further.
Those whose quiet loyalty became the oxygen of my spacecraft.
I won’t name them. They know.
And I’ve learned — painfully — that the universe is made of two forces:
Vanity, dark matter, which inflates emptiness and distorts distances.
And love, luminous gravity, which pulls things together, illuminates, and heals.
Trials push us between the two.
But they never lie.
They urge us to choose.
Ten years. Not a victory.
A passage. A soft, continuous tremor.
The trial is not over — and that’s a blessing.
Because as long as I orbit, I keep unlearning.
And in that vertigo, I sometimes find balance.
So no, this isn’t EBF’s anniversary.
It’s just a suspended moment,
where a man — up there, inside, and beneath it all —
looks into the space within himself.
And gives thanks.
Translated from French with the assistance of AI.
