Sound. It begins with the knocking. With the sound of hands against wood and the footsteps, I understand that my peace must die now. I will no longer be alone, but I will be lonely. So many voices speaking to me, yet not one of them believes me. So many ideas, yet they all hate disabled people. So much hatred and pride.

It knocks three times, and I know that once again, I will have to die - metaphorically. I will have to give myself up, drown my honesty in electrolytes and bathe my body in lactate. Acid burns its way through my legs, my arms and my heart. Help comes with conditions, the currency is ignorance, and I am broke. Do you understand? Nothing changes my world. Nothing, absolutely nothing, changes my world.

I wonder: Do you carry me in your heart? Am I there when you laugh, and am I there when you cry? Because I am alone so much. Because I am lonely so much. My room is a vessel that could overflow at any moment, and my bedsheet is soaked.

I have to justify myself again. Yes, I am ill. Yes, I am disabled. Yes, I take pictures. Yes, I want things to get better. Yes, I am not depressed. Yes, I believe my life is worth living. Yes, I want to live. Yes, I want to be loved.

Someday, someday, I will surely be able to laugh again. I will surely be able to look at the stars again. Someday, I will surely be home again, truly at home.

Making art means breathing, and I have always breathed. I breathed every second before I became ill.

For a long time, I was allowed to bathe in humanity, to find myself within it and discover myself anew. Society. We always say it like that: “Society.” But what do we actually mean by it? Not philosophically, semantically or socioculturally, but personally. Are you society? Am I? Are we? But you do not hate me, so why does society hate me?

I want to set fires. I want to watch it burn, society, and use its ashes to fertilise the fields. But the knocking continues. I have to open the door. I have to let them in. The doctors, the people from the health insurance companies, the politicians, the tax lawyers. I have to wash their feet and take off my clothes, have to make myself naked and let them touch me, have to let them do it to me, have to nod and laugh, have to agree with them and hide my hatred, have to die while they are there so that afterwards I can build a new self from my own ashes.

I have to humiliate myself, have to let them hate me, and have to lie there in my bed.

Have to lie there, just like that. Fragile, small, breakable.

The next morning, I wash my face with acid to live up to the hatred. I want to bleach myself until I become one with the wall behind me. I want to dissolve so that I no longer have to endure society.

And yet, I love. But those who love have no place in the cruelty of injustice.

Those who love simply know too much. We would rather forget them, the lovers. We would rather drown them in work and hatred.

But I will not let them do this to me. I have escaped death a few times already, and I can surely do it a few more times. My ideas will live forever. Life breathed the idea of justice into me a long time ago, and that is why I painted. Now I take pictures instead. I do not care. They will see that in the drought of hatred, every flower suffocates.

I will remain a child, and I will remain real. When I wake up, I am awake, and when I am tired, I sleep. And fighting? I stopped fighting a long time ago. After all, I was able to paint for a long time, and now I can take pictures.