Utterly Lost

A light rain began to fall a few hours ago. The seconds drag on like raindrops on dirty windows. The weather was probably mocking me. One, two, three... And then I realized—I was completely, absolutely lost. The realization didn’t come as a shock, but as a quiet truth, settling like dust. Lost—not just in the empty streets of this village, an abandoned place, tucked away in the vastness of nowhere, with its long-empty shop windows and where the smell of asphalt mixes with the distant chime of a church bell. No, I was lost somewhere deep, in that corner of my soul where questions have no answers, and the paths blur into the fog spreading around.

I looked around without hope. My gaze reflected in the broken windows, glinting dully under the flickering streetlights. It lingered on the few figures huddled in the shelter of long-abandoned shops—shapeless silhouettes wrapped in thick, tattered quilts. I stared at the dark houses, seemingly lifeless, lurking on both sides of the sidewalks, with sleeping windows and peeling plaster in layers. Weeds push their way through the cracked pavement, and along the central alley, heavy branches stretch toward the ground, their leaves like fingers searching for something in the mud. The air carries the heavy scent of decay, of something long gone and completely irretrievable.

And I, at forty-seven years old, with a backpack on my back and a notebook clutched in my hand, understand that my life had crumbled like a house of cards. I don’t feel fear. It’s strange that, for the first time, I feel alive and breathe deeply the air of freedom to be just myself.

Yesterday, I left—left Sofia, the apartment with faded wallpaper and the musty smell of stale memories. I left the office where no one will miss me—after all, I’m just a small, completely replaceable cog in the machine. I left the voices—family, friends, the clamor of a world that demanded I be recognizable, settled, the same. The same: the word is like a stone, cold, too heavy, meant to bind me to a life I no longer want. I had wished to break free, to drift with the current and get lost.

Now I stand at a crossroads, between two alleys stretching into shadow. The gravel stirs memories of fragments of hope. The village—whose name I never remembered, almost abandoned—lies somewhere in the south, perhaps near the border, where the land turns to dust, and the people, with faces carved by exhaustion and distrust, carry the weight of untold stories. The streetlights flicker, casting uneven reflections in the large puddles. Graffiti mark the walls. Jagged lines that speak of defiance, of presence: “I am here, even if I don’t know where,” I answer silently to the writing.

It’s hard, but I still smile. Deep inside, I feel something familiar reaching out, its tendrils wrapping around my consciousness. There’s something almost magical in this—not knowing, not wanting to know where I am. Refusing to follow the paths others draw for me. Standing against a world that insists I be in a certain place, have a purpose, be part of the collective.

But still—why was I here? Was this moment of being lost predetermined? The answer isn’t easy. Perhaps it lies in the years I had lived, in the choices I had made or missed. Had I known it even back then—in the ‘90s in Bulgaria—but lacked the courage to fully realize it? In that moment, in that world where everything was heading toward ruin, and I had timidly begun to search for myself among the debris.

In 1995, I was seventeen. A terribly confused young man, chained by the big city. Sofia felt like a place cast out of time. The streets were gray, the sidewalks broken, and the air carried the smell of gasoline from old Ladas. People, downtrodden, stood for hours, patiently waiting in lines for bread, for milk, for anything that could be bought with the few leva that still held some value. Everything around was falling apart. The economy was collapsing, hyperinflation swallowed my parents’ meager savings, and the television constantly showed politicians straining to make promises no one believed anymore. It was a time of fracture, a nation caught between what was and what could be. Even then, I felt that fracture deep within me.

In my small room in Lyulin, I sought refuge and answers in music. Not the nostalgic kind that poured from the national radio, but the other kind, the one that cut sharply through the noise of the world. I listened to bootleg Nirvana tapes, secretly bought from Slaveykov Square. Kurt Cobain’s voice, raw, painful like an open wound, sang: “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me/ Tell me where did you sleep last night.” I felt it as a question to myself. A question I wanted to ask the world, and all those whom time separated me from, not physically, but emotionally. An enigma whose answers remained hidden in the concrete walls of my room. “Where was I? Where did my dreams go? Where was the life we imagined? Where had the freedom we longed for vanished?”

I poured my heart onto checkered pages. I wanted to write poems as answers. But was I not asking the same questions again?

I hid my writing from my mother because she often told me that “writing won’t feed me.” But I wrote—about freedom, about rebellion, about dreams that were completely impossible in a world where survival was the only goal. And I was scared. I couldn’t see myself clearly, but I saw everyone around me get lost—in alcohol, in petty crime, in despair. I saw them crushed by the reality of a transition too heavy for most.

Back then, listening to “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” over and over on my old cassette player, I began to feel lost for the first time. Not because I had given up on my dreams, but because I didn’t believe I could follow them in this world, so tormented and steeped in grayness. Cobain stubbornly sang of his pain and his refusal to give up. “In the pines, in the pines/ Where the sun don’t ever shine,” he insisted, and I imagined myself there, in the dark pines, searching for something I couldn’t name.

The years that followed were like a dream I couldn’t wake from. I finished high school with mediocre grades, which robbed me of the chance to attend university. And what good would it have done me anyway? Just another institution meant to teach you to think the same, to mold you, to make you recognizable to others. I didn’t want that! I sought only the promised freedom.

At nineteen, the system ensnared me in its relentless grip, forcing me to start work. Not skilled work—hard, boring, crushing. Life caught me in its trap, invisible but tightly bound. An ill-considered marriage followed, ending quickly and with bitterness. I began to accumulate debts. The few friends I had started to disappear with the excuse: “I have my own problems.” And all the while, I heard voices telling me I needed to find my way, to “settle down,” to be like everyone else. Each passing year distanced me further from that boy who wrote poems by the light of a bedside lamp. I felt life closing around me, a trap not of iron, but of endless expectations.

But I didn’t want to be the same, I never had been. And so, when yesterday my boss told me I had to stay late for yet another meaningless project, something in me bent and broke. I didn’t take it with sadness. I simply gathered my things from the office desk, left the keys with security, and walked away. Forever. I didn’t notice when I reached the bus station. It was as if I woke up to the voice of the ticket clerk behind the counter window.

“Where to?” she looked at me with the gaze of an experienced psychologist facing yet another confused patient.

“To the farthest place,” I hadn’t thought about where I wanted to go.

She glanced at the computer monitor in front of her, shook her head slightly with a hint of mockery, and quickly printed a ticket. She handed it to me and nodded in the direction I should go.

“Second exit, to the left. Third sector. Hurry, boy, if you want to catch the bus.”

“Hurry, hurry, hurry, boy…” her voice suddenly rang in my ears like an intrusive refrain.

I ran as fast as I could. I wanted to escape as quickly as possible from everything—from Sofia, from the routine, from the feeling that my life was a lie I lived to please others.

I boarded the bus at the last minute. The driver was about to close the door and gave me a sour look as I waved my hands in front of the windshield of the old, battered Bova. I settled near the back, next to an almost eighty-year-old grandmother, clutching a small bundle tightly to her chest. It wasn’t until we left the outskirts of Sofia that she turned to me. She looked at me with strange affection and smiled a toothless smile.

“Are you going on a business trip, boy?”

“Not exactly, I want to travel a little,” I wasn’t in the mood for confessions.

“You young people love to roam the world. When you get older, you’ll realize there’s no better place than your native home.”

“Or worse,” I thought to myself, but said nothing.

“My husband passed away last year, and the kids decided to take me to live with them in Sofia, but a stone weighs best in its own place, take it from me.”

Over the next few hours, she told me many things—about herself, her late husband, her son’s family who wanted to take her in in her old age. She showed me a stack of faded black-and-white photos from long-gone times, pulled from a small plastic wallet carefully hidden in her bundle.

“And will you manage alone in the village?” I asked her when she tucked the photos back into her small bundle.

“Why wouldn’t I manage? What does a soul need—a piece of bread and a roof over your head,” she looked at me in surprise, as if condemning a greed for life I hadn’t expressed but she had sensed in me.

“I’m not greedy for money, I’m thirsty for freedom,” I said sharply, wanting to justify myself.

“I know that thirst, boy… It’s the life force of our entire nation, but the politicians are trying to dry it up. It won’t be long before they succeed, chaining the spirit of the people and destroying it.”

I couldn’t find the right words to respond to her comment. I stared out the window at the passing landscape. Though it was late spring, the fields weren’t green; the colors of scorched and desolate land stretched around.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because the driver’s voice startled me.

“Last stop!” he shouted deafeningly.

I looked around again, disoriented in time and place. I felt the weight of a hand-knitted woolen vest the grandmother had covered me with so I wouldn’t get cold.

“I don’t know what you’ve set your mind to do, but if you don’t find a place to spend the night, ask for Grandma Gina the Healer. My little house is at the edge of the village, I’ll find you a bed and a slice of bread. I’ve healed many souls and bodies over the years, maybe I can help you too,” the woman quickly folded the woolen vest with her bony fingers, tucked it into her bundle, and headed for the bus exit.

I got off in the twilight of the spring evening and walked off without direction. And here I am now, sitting on the curb of a street in a nameless village, notebook in hand, mud on my shoes. It’s quiet around, only the wind whispers softly, carrying the smell of rain and my desire for solitude.

I had passed by a small bookstore, perhaps closed decades ago, its window—dusty and covered with old book posters—showing me an unfamiliar man of forty-seven. A man with eyes that had seen too many lies to believe in the “right path.” But in those eyes, there was also a new spark, lost and found again. The spark of that boy from the ‘90s who sang along with Cobain: “I would shiver the night through.”

I took out my pen and started writing. The words flowed like a river, without beginning or end. I wrote about the betrayals that shaped us as people, silently broken to live by others’ rules. I wrote about the stories that lied to me, that there was only one path—a paved highway to success, family, security. I wrote about the freedom that comes when you stop looking for the right direction and just walk.

And as if with its sounds—ghostly, distant—this lost village was only telling me: “Keep going.”

I remembered one evening in 1995, sitting in the twilight on a bench in front of my building in Lyulin. I was trying to find a plausible excuse for my failing grade in math. My mother would again start her speech about how I’d become “nobody” if I didn’t “get a grip.” An old neighbor slowly approached in the dark and sat beside me. He lit an Arda cigarette, paused for a second, then said: “Life isn’t about finding yourself, but about losing enough to understand who you are.” He hadn’t turned to me, as if his words were meant for the whole world. Back then, I didn’t understand. I thought he was just drunk.

But now—sitting in the mud, notebook in hand—his words came back to me like an echo. To be lost isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a resistance, a refusal to submit to a world that wants to put you in a familiar box.

I stared at the street ahead. It was narrow, winding, with cracks in the asphalt that seemed to hold the stories of other lost souls. In the distance, a rumble—perhaps a storm was approaching. I didn’t know where the road ahead led, nor if I’d find shelter if the rain grew stronger. But for the first time in years, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need a map or a compass. I just wanted to walk, to write, and to be. “My girl, my girl, where will you go?”—Cobain’s words echoed in my head again, as if asking me where my direction lay. And I answered him: “In the pines, in the pines/ Where the sun don’t ever shine.” There, where the sun doesn’t shine, but I will find my way.

I looked at the sky—overcast, as if still hesitating whether to fully open above me. Maybe the rain would intensify. Maybe it would pour and wash away everything I was. I felt no resistance. I was at peace. The raindrops seemed to whisper to me to let go of everything familiar. I remembered Cobain again, his voice, the edge of freedom he sang about. I opened a new page in my notebook and quickly wrote: “I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.” I tore out the page and folded it into a small boat. I set it to sail in the stream of rainwater beneath my feet. I lifted my soaked backpack onto my shoulder, tucked the notebook into my jacket pocket, and set off down the street. I didn’t know where it would lead. Maybe to Grandma Gina’s little house, or maybe somewhere far from it. It took me a few seconds to realize I was completely lost. And a few more to understand that this was the only place I wanted to be.