Black Passport
What does home mean to you?
Dear James,
Thank you for your question. I must admit, I have wrestled with it deeply.
In Berlin—especially in the dark grasp of winter—I found the city to be a desert for the heart. One evening, as I walked along a path near the river, the sun collapsed behind the horizon. Suddenly, the sky turned a blood red. I paused, exhausted, and leaned against the fence. And as I stood there, I sensed an infinite scream passing through the city. It was the scream of homelessness.
Berlin—perhaps not in its entirety, but in its essence—was anonymity made colossal. A city where solitude did not diminish in the crowd but only deepened. A place where loneliness crystallized into something pure, absolute, inescapable. That scream, that vast and wordless cry, cleaved through me at the height of my youth.
When I arrived in Berlin, it was not merely a city I entered, but a kingdom of strangeness—where every soul bore a crown of solitude. It became a silent exile within the self. I felt truly homesick. The world no longer felt like home.
So I searched for a way to inhabit my solitude, to shape it rather than be shaped by it. I turned to writing—to distill the darkness, to give form to grief, to press meaning from the weight of existence. It began with a small black book: first, a refuge; then, an abyss. The more I wrote, the more it claimed me. I no longer possessed the book; the book possessed me. Each word carved deeper into my being, until my very self was drawn into its pages.
Writing ceased to be an escape and became something else entirely. A transformation. A retreat so absolute that my inner world began to eclipse the outer one. I recorded everything—as if by naming life, I could make it real. My life did not become poetry. Poetry became the only life possible.
And then, something shifted. The fear that had bound me dissolved into power. Slowly, I began to build my own home—not of walls, but of words.
In short, poetry became my shelter, greater than any house could be. So large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. They could take everything from me—except this little black book, whose roots rest in infinity and whose branches stretch into the unknown. It was not an object, but a passage. A threshold. A black passport to the eternal mother.
In its pages, I did not merely write—I became.
I understood then that life’s purpose is not prosperity, as we are led to believe, but the slow maturation of the soul. And language—this fragile, luminous thread—was my path toward that becoming.
In this becoming, in this slow unfolding of the self, I saw it at last: my fear had been born of the illusion that every path leads away from the mother, away from home. But now I understood—there is no path that is not also a return. No step that does not incline homeward.
Home is not a place. It is not behind or ahead. Not here nor there. Home is within—or it is nowhere at all. It is the longing itself, the ceaseless search for origin, for meaning, for new metaphors of belonging. And in that search, we return—inevitably.
Every step is birth. Every step is death. Every grave is mother. And every mother, always, a child again.
So, this lonely scream of Berlin—this fall that is also an ascent—holds a fascinated beauty that defies name. I would call it the Tear of God.
The Tear of God falls when a friend weeps, and you witness their sorrow as your own. The Tear of God is a child running through the rain, shielded in its mother’s arms. The Tear of God is swimming naked with your loved ones in an endless sea—weightless, boundless, eternal.
It is grief and grace entwined. The fall that lifts. The descent that is also a rising. And here, in this fall that is my ascent, I found my home.
Now, when we return home and meet our mother’s eyes—it may become clear that we are perhaps nothing more, and nothing less, than young poets of the world. Each bearing the wound of creation.
With our little black books—our black passports—we carve the eternal into the smallest, most fleeting details.
We exist, in the house of poetry.
Waiting for the Tear of God to fall.
Pressing it into the language. Pressing it to our hearts. Holding it. Shaping it.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
With love,
Coma